Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Ahh with a little more digging it seems that the sourceforge project is GNU Netcat which is as you say GPL and currently at 0.7.1.
The netcat package in ubuntu is the "classic" netcat which is free as in the public domain...this is the original and is as old as the moon.
Then the BSD Netcat was a rewrite which is under the BSD licence, this is the one that seems to get the most frequent attention. Although you could also argue that the others are just finished :)
It sounds like I probably want the BSD version, then, but for the time being I'd rather stick with binaries from the repos.
Researching further off the back of netcat, I have discovered that socat is a better match for what I need. Indeed the following command: sudo socat -x TCP4-LISTEN:10000,fork,reuseaddr TCP4:192.168.100.10:10000
.. does exactly what I was after, except that for some reason the -x switch is not doing what the documentation suggests it should - it echos data correctly but does not indicate direction of data travel using > and <
In contrast, netcat seems to need scripts to be written to spawn processes when connections are made and is altogether more complicated for this task than socat. If it weren't for the pointers to netcat I'd not have found it, though, so thanks again all!