Zen and the Art of the Internet

5.1: Using Telnet

As with FTP (see Anonymous FTP), the actual command for negotiating a telnet connection varies from system to system. The most common is telnet itself, though. It takes the form of:

telnet somewhere.domain

To be safe, we'll use your local system as a working example. By now, you hopefully know your site's domain name. If not, ask or try to figure it out. You'll not get by without it.

To open the connection, type

telnet your.system.name

If the system were wubba.cs.widener.edu, for example, the command would look like

telnet wubba.cs.widener.edu

The system will respond with something similar to

Trying 147.31.254.999...
Connected to wubba.cs.widener.edu.
Escape character is '^]'.

The escape character, in this example ^] (Control-]), is the character that will let you go back to the local system to close the connection, suspend it, etc. To close this connection, the user would type ^], and respond to the telnet> prompt with the command close. Local documentation should be checked for information on specific commands, functions, and escape character that can be used.