Netcat / Ncat / Gnu-Netcat

netcat is the swiss army knife of a Network administrator. You can debug network connections, create connections which use TCP or UDP, read/write data to these connections and a lot more.

IPFire ships two versions of Netcat:

1. Ncat which is the standard netcat of IPFire since Core 101. This netcat provides:
   /usr/bin/nc
   You can install it with:
   pakfire install ncat

2. Gnu-netcat which is another version of Netcat. It does not provide:
   /usr/bin/nc
   You can install it with:
   pakfire install gnu-netcat

Change standard Netcat:

The standard netcat provides
/usr/bin/nc
By default ncat is the standard netcat in IPFire.
If you want to change this (because you have a script which needs gnu-netcat) you can do this with:

Set Ncat as standard netcat:
ln -f -s /usr/bin/ncat /usr/bin/nc

Set gnu-netcat as standard netcat

ln -f -s /usr/bin/ncat /usr/bin/nc