On: A Unix Utility You Should Know About: Netcat (2009)

[harshreality]

There's a better utility available than ncat. It's called socat. It has more features than ncat that people might find useful.

http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/doc/socat.html#EXAMPLES

[amboar → harshreality]

Dropped into the comments to mention socat. I use it regularly to debug serial and multicast issues or to lash up network logging for random shell scripts. It's a very valuable addition to the toolbox IMO.

Edit: somehow my phone managed to post this comment three times. I've deleted the others

[sargun → harshreality]

I really like socat, and use it pretty regularly for interfacing with unix sockets. Ncat, and socat have a divergent featureset though. Some combination of the two yields good results.