An Overview of Netcat for Networking and Debugging Purposes

"Netcat is a simple Unix utility which reads and writes data across network connections, using TCP or UDP 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, or "nc" as the actual program is named, should have been supplied long ago as another one of those cryptic but standard Unix tools."

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