7 Fundamental Use Cases of Netcat

A guide to Netcat — TCP/IP Swiss Army knife

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Introduction:

Netcat is regarded as TCP/IP Swiss Army Knife. It is a command-line utility that is so simple yet powerful and can perform operations related to Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), User Data Protocol (UDP). It has an additional capability of being a reliable back-end tool that can be used by other scripts.

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. — man page

Installation:

Netcat (short for NC) can be installed with the command below. The example below is for Debian-based Operating systems.

apt-get install netcat

Use Cases:

There are many use-cases for this tool. It is to be noted that both the listener and client mode in Netcat take input from STDIN and display the data received from the network on STDOUT. I have typically used Netcat for testing a server, creating a server for one-time usage that prints out the desired output, as a temporary chat application. Apart from this, there are several other use-cases. Below is a list of the typical scenarios for using this…