Netcat on Mac OS X

It looks to me as if the -p option does nothing on the OS X version of netcat. To get it to work, I must do nc -l localhost 8888.

Here's how this is working for me on OS X 10.10, with either the installed BSD version, or the one from Homebrew:

BSD Version

When using the BSD version that ships with OS X, a server can be started like this

/usr/bin/nc -l 9999

Homebrew

• Install using Homebrew: brew install netcat
• This will install v0.7.1 of http://netcat.sourceforge.net/
• One can use either the nc or netcat command. nc is an alias for netcat.

To start a server:

nc -l -p 9999

To start a client:

nc targethost 9999

To get the manpage of this version, one needs to use man netcat, as man nc will open the manpage of the BSD version.

I needed to test a web service over SSL, which ncat (made by the nmap team) supports.

brew install nmap
ncat -C --ssl api.somecompany.com 443

https://nmap.org/ncat/