With the -q option (query), it tries to contact a server already running on the specified host. If it succeeds, it prints the PID of that server.
With the -k option, mslavedc tries to kill any mslaved process already running on the local host.
If neither -k nor -q is given, mslavedc expects the pathname of mslaved(8) as an argument. A datagram socket is created and mslaved is exec'ed with the socket as standard input. The -p option may be used to specify a port number other than the default of 9359. The -n option and its argument, if present, are passed on to mslaved to set its nice value. The -t (timeout) option is also passed to mslaved; if not present, -t900 is used giving a timeout of 15 minutes.