An intro to netcat — First published in fullweb.io issue #13

netcat-intro.md

An intro to netcat

Ever heard of netcat? It’s a small network utility to create TCP and UDP connections.

Simple file transfer over network:

# Run the server with:
$ nc -l 8000 > file_you_receive

# Send the file on the client with:
$ cat file_you_send | nc server_ip 8000

Getting fancy, transferring lots of small/medium files efficiently:

$ tar -cf - . | pigz | nc -l 8000

# On the receiving machine:
nc server_ip 8000 > all_your_files.tar.gz

pigz is a parallel gzip.

By default netcat uses TCP, use UDP with -u:

netcat -u -l 8000