This short article shows some useful netcat commands. netcat is known as the TCP/IP swiss army knife. From the netcat man page: netcat is a simple unix utility which reads and writes data across network connections, using TCP or UDP protocol.

lsof is used to LiSt Open Files, hence the command’s name. It’s a handy tool normally used to list the open files on a system along with the associated processes or users, and can also be used to gather information on your system’s network connections. When run without options, lsof lists all open files along with all of the active processes that have them open.

I use it most for getting network connection related information from a system, but that's just the beginning for this amazing and little-known application.

In this article I will show how to install and use QuickStart on an Ubuntu 8.04 desktop. QuickStart is like a Swiss army knife, it allows you to do various things on your Ubuntu desktop: creating and restoring backups, running scheduled backups, backing up configuration files, installing some common applications, installing DVD codecs, deleting unnecessary files, etc.

You may already be familiar with the cat utility, which can send files to standard input and output. Ncat does something similar, except it's for sending data over the network or accepting data to a local machine. In the right hands, ncat can be an extremely useful tool for system administration and troubleshooting

The "client for URLs," or cURL utility, is one of those deceptively simple, handy little programs. The more you dig into it, the more you learn about what it can do. cURL is a download and copying utility that recognizes a host of transfer protocols — HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, TFTP, GopherR, Telnet, DICT, LDAP, and FILE.

Like a digital Swiss Army knife, these are the Linux utilities and tools that are so useful you won't know how you ever did without them.

This is the second post in the article series about Unix utilities that you should know about. In this post I will introduce you to the netcat tool or simply nc.

The Open Source project behind the Google Chrome browser called Chromium has finally established an official Alpha release and it promises to be a very lightweight swiss army knife once completed.