About:
Socat is a relay for bidirectional data transfer between two independent data channels. Each of these data channels may be a file, pipe, device (terminal or modem, etc.), socket (Unix, IP4, IP6 - raw, UDP, TCP), SSL, a client for SOCKS4, or proxy CONNECT. It supports broadcasts and multicasts, abstract Unix sockets, Linux tun/tap, GNU readline, and PTYs. It provides forking, logging, and dumping and different modes for interprocess communication. Many options are available for tuning socat and its channels. Socat can be used, for example, as a TCP relay (one-shot or daemon), as a daemon-based socksifier, as a shell interface to Unix sockets, as an IP6 relay, or for redirecting TCP-oriented programs to a serial line.

Author:
Gerhard Rieger [contact developer]

Rating:	reset 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
8.79/10.00 (12 votes)

Homepage:
http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/
Tar/GZ:
http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/download/socat-1.6.0.1.tar.gz
Tar/BZ2:
http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/download/socat-1.6.0.1.tar.bz2
Changelog:
http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/doc/CHANGES

Trove categories: [change]

[Development Status]		5 - Production/Stable
[Environment]		Console (Text Based)
[Intended Audience]		System Administrators
[License]		OSI Approved :: GNU General Public License (GPL)
[Operating System]		POSIX :: AIX, POSIX :: BSD :: FreeBSD, POSIX :: Linux, POSIX :: SunOS/Solaris
[Programming Language]		C
[Topic]		Utilities

Dependencies: [change]
No dependencies filed

 Branches

Branch	Version	Last release	License	URLs
Stable	1.6.0.1	10-Feb-2008	GNU General Public License (GPL)

 Comments

[»] Awesome UNIX utility!
by NanoTech - Apr 7th 2008 15:51:13

I had written a small program, named sockio, which does a (very) small subset of what this awesome socat utility does. When I discovered socat, I was impressed by the number of useful features, in particular SSL support.

With its clean design, this utility keeps the spirit of UNIX: Basic utilities that can be piped or connected together!

The possibilities are infinite. I can now connect together any two bi-directional streams.

Now, I'm tempted to write a Windows port.

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[»] Far more than a swiss army knife of networking ;)
by Tino - Jan 27th 2007 10:40:56

The most interesting options IMHO are builtin SSL and SOCKS support. With the latter it's easy to map a TOR hidden service to a local port to access it like any other service on the Internet. Here you have the answer to (nearly) all your networking interconnection needs you ever might think of.

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[»] A+++ for socat
by SeSe - Jul 16th 2006 01:00:22

Truly awesome, we use it extensively in productions systems and it rocks! Please keep developing!
Cheers,
SS

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[»] Fantastic!!!
by Florin Andrei - Oct 4th 2002 17:54:09

Friggin' unbelievable! All my dreams come true! Now i can pipe stdin to the UDP:syslog port, or redirect the output of /bin/ls to an arbitrary TCP port on an arbitrary host! Stuff like that.
Awesome! Really, really awesome!
Thank you for the excellent application!

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