Penguin
Note: You are viewing an old revision of this page. View the current version.

NetCat is a networking utility.

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.

Netcat was originally written as a Unix utility by a person known only as 'Hobbit', and released as 'public domain':

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 GPLs, Berkeley copyrights or any of that nonsense.

This tree ended at 1.10 and can be installed on Debian with apt-get netcat. (See nc(1)).

The Netcat in the link at the top of this article is a fully POSIX compatible rewrite from scratch, known as GNU Netcat. It is maintained by Giovanni Giacobbi. It has been referred to as "netcat ran through indent".

To complicate matters, there is a netcat6 for IPv6 networks, which is yet another rewrite.

CLUG's wiki has a page on NetCat with some examples.