CLI for Noobies: A Primer on the Linux Command Line

Chapter 60. Netcat

Netcat is often described at the “Swiss Army knife” of Internet tools, because it can do a lot of different things, from copying files, to forwarding ports, to logging in to the shell or executing programs remotely.

The big problem with Netcat is that it’s not secure. DO NOT USE IT OVER THE INTERNET. On your home LAN, behind a good firewall, it’s OK. But otherwise, DO NOT USE IT.

Netcat on the LAN

Speaking of home LANs, I am going to use ssh to set up my laptop as one of the two machines talking via Netcat, rather than getting up from the office and walking to the living room each time I need to enter something at that end. So let’s go over some of the housekeeping I did first.

First I added an entry in my /etc/hosts file on my ...