Remote syslog from the command line

I wanted to test sending syslog messagest to remote hosts, but the logger utility doesn’t support sending syslog messages to remote hosts. To do the test I came up with the following Perl one-liner:

perl -MSys::Syslog=:standard,:extended -e 'setlogsock(udp => shift);
  openlog(qw(test cons user));
  syslog(emerg => "@ARGV")' 1.2.3.4 message to send

Older versions of the module (found in RHEL5) don’t support supplying the host in setlogsock():

perl -MSys::Syslog=:standard,:extended -e 'setlogsock("udp"); $Sys::Syslog::host = shift;
  openlog(qw(test cons user));
  syslog(emerg => "@ARGV")' 1.2.3.4 message to send

If the system had socat installed, I could have used this instead:

socat UNIX-RECVFROM:socket_file udp4-sendto:1.2.3.4:514
logger -d -u socket_file bar

Or just use echo and netcat:

echo message to send | nc 1.2.3.4 514