
The flexibility and usefulness of this tool prompted the Nmap Project to produce Ncat, a modern reimplementation which supports SSL, IPv6, SOCKS and http proxies, connection brokering, and more.

It can sometimes even be hard to find a copy of the v1.10 source code. The original Netcat was released by Hobbit in 1995, but it hasn't been maintained despite its popularity. 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, including port binding to accept incoming connections. It is designed to be a reliable back-end tool to use directly or easily drive by other programs and scripts.

This simple utility reads and writes data across TCP or UDP network connections.
