Periodically I find myself in the need to check for TCP port availability; and no convenient tools available and not possible to install one.
Usually I use netcat -z -v cidrc port or telnet.
Lately I've found quite useful some under-appreciated feature of bash shell.
See /dev/tcp.
Source: http://stackoverflow.com/a/19866239
# Connection successful:
$ timeout 1 bash -c 'cat < /dev/null > /dev/tcp/google.com/80' && echo ping || echo fail
ping