View Source: NetCat - Waikato Linux Users Group

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NetCat is a tool for connecting stdin(3)/stdout(3) to a [TCP]/[UDP] connection, giving [Shell] scripts the power to excercise or even provide network services.

It was initially written for [Unix] by someone known only as <i>Hobbit</i> and released as public domain. Development of this tool continued up to version 1.10. nc(1) is the ManPage for this tool, and it can be installed on [Debian] using <tt>apt-get install netcat</tt>.

> It is freely given away to the Internet community in the hope that it will be useful, with no restrictions except giving credit where it is due. No [GPL]s, [Berkeley copyrights | BSDLicense] or any of that nonsense.

There is now a fully [POSIX]-compatible rewrite known as [GNU Netcat | http://netcat.sourceforge.net/]. It is maintained by Giovanni Giacobbi and has been referred to as "[netcat ran through indent|http://mike.filespanker.com/post/67/]".

> Netcat is a featured networking utility which reads and writes data across network connections, using the [TCP/IP] [Protocol]. It is designed to be a reliable "back-end" tool that can be used directly or easily driven by other programs and scripts. At the same time, it is a feature-rich network debugging and exploration tool, since it can create almost any kind of connection you would need and has several interesting built-in capabilities.

To complicate matters, there is also another rewrite called [netcat6 | http://netcat6.sourceforge.net/] to adds support for [IPv6] networks to the original utility.

[CLUG]'s wiki has a [page on NetCat|http://clug.net.nz/index.php/netcat] with some examples.

No page links to NetCat.

Version 6, saved on Sunday, August 28, 2005 2:12:05 am by AristotlePagaltzis

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