netcat-traditional

TCP/IP swiss army knife

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. This is the "classic" netcat, written by *Hobbit*. It lacks many features found in netcat-openbsd.