non-interactive method of testing BuildForge availability

I am trying to find a simple way to ensure that the buildforge listener is running on my various build clients, outside of the buildforge console.  I had hoped to simply check the process listing and see if the "bfagent" process showed up, but I believe that isn't going to work if some of the UNIX machines start the listener through inetd or something like that, because there will be no bfagent listed. (?)

I also know, that if I can determine the port number that the agent is supposed to be listening to, I can do something like "telnet <machine> <port>" and look for something like: 200 HELLO - BuildForge Agent v7.1.3.0-0-0054, but in the situation I am in, it isn't really possible to use telnet, because the test command must be non-interactive, and I can't find a way to make telnet work.  Is there some other command that would attempt to connect to the listener, dump the BuildForge response to stdout, and then exit?  Or better yet, some Buildforge native command I can run which will tell me if the listener is running or not.

Thanks,
Chris