Using curl for Telnet Testing

Rich Trouton:

As part of introducing macOS High Sierra, Apple removed the telnet tool from macOS. This was part of Apple’s overall effort to improve security, as telnet does not use encryption and its traffic can be intercepted and read. However, telnet did (and does) serve a useful function as a quick way to check if it is possible to connect to a remote server on a particular port.

While there are alternative tools available for this task (like netcat), it’s also possible to still create a telnet connection on macOS using another tool: curl