Did You Know? netcat is a unix utility which reads and writes data across network connections, using TCP or UDP protocol. It's 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's 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. Netcat, or "nc" as the actual program is named, should have been supplied long ago as another one of those cryptic but standard Unix tools.