Netcat: it's not just Telnet. It's network duct tape and magic.
2025-11-28
If I were sent to a deserted digital island and allowed to take only one networking utility — I would unhesitatingly choose Netcat.
The official documentation (man nc) dryly states: “a utility for reading from and writing to network connections using TCP or UDP.”
In practice it’s the Swiss army knife of the network engineer, replacing dozens of specialized programs.
The article uses examples for OpenBSD netcat — this is the one that ships by default in Ubuntu 20.04+, Debian 10+, Fedora, Arch, Alpine and most modern distributions.