echo server with netcat or socat

Question

I want a UDP echo server to get packets, and reply exactly what it has received. How can I simply do this using netcat or socat? It should stay alive forever and handle packets coming from several hosts.

Answer 1

Another netcat-like tool is the nmap version, ncat, that has lots of built in goodies to simplify things like this. This would work:

ncat -e /bin/cat -k -u -l 1235

-e means it executes /bin/cat (to echo back what you type)
-k means keep-alive, that it keeps listening after each connection
-u means udp
-l 1235 means that it listens on port 1235

Answer 2

I used socat -v PIPE udp-recvfrom:5553,fork to run the server and socat - udp:localhost:5553 for clients. This was a great help!

Answer 3

You can also use socat (rather than using netcat) as echo server and netcat as client.

Socat echo server (listens on TCP port 1234):

socat -v tcp-l:1234,fork exec:'/bin/cat'

Netcat client (connects to serverip on TCP port 1234):

nc serverip 1234

Answer 4

netcat solution pre-installed in Ubunutu

The netcat pre-installed in Ubuntu 16.04 comes from netcat-openbsd, and has no -c option, but the manual gives a solution:

sudo mknod -m 777 fifo p
cat fifo | netcat -l -k localhost 8000 > fifo

Then client example:

echo abc | netcat localhost 8000

TODO: how to modify the input string value? The following does not return any reply:

cat fifo | tr 'a' 'b' | netcat -l -k localhost 8000 > fifo

The remote shell example however works:

cat fifo | /bin/sh -i 2>&1 | netcat -l -k localhost 8000 > fifo

I don't know how to deal with concurrent requests simply however.

Answer 5

You can write a C program that forks nc -u -l -p 4321 and then uses dup(2) to connect:

• nc stdin with the parent's stdout
• nc stdout with the parent's stdin

Then in an endless loop the parent reads from stdin and writes in stdout whatever the parent reads.

Answer 6

If you are running on Windows and use a unix like environment like cygwin, netcat migth not provide the -e parameter. This worked just fine for me.

http://bansky.net/echotool/