Question

There’s already a working server service via socket, and I would like to test it via netcat. I’m using Mac OS X Lion. Currently, I’m able to connect to server via port, to send packet, but the packet contains wrong value. Here are the details:

I need to send ‘m’ symbol to the server and the server will return 00000000, a zero byte as a response. Server guy told me, server receives ‘A0’ when I’m sending ‘m’, and server receives ‘313039A’ when I’m sending ‘109’. How to define sending format or something, I just need to send ‘m’ (01101101)?

Answer 1

You can send just “m” with

echo -n 'm' | nc <server> <port>

You can easily check what you’re sending on your local machine:

# in one Terminal start the listener:
$ nc -l 1234 | hexdump -C
00000000  6d                                                |m|
00000001

# in other Terminal send the packet:
$ echo -n 'm' | nc 127.0.0.1 1234

nc will happily send/receive NUL bytes – there is no problem with that:

# sending side
$ echo -n X | tr X '\000' | nc 127.0.0.1 1234

# receiving side
$ nc -l 1234 | hexdump -C
00000000  00                                                |.|
00000001