That's a litmus test for me when working with other technicians. If they need to transfer a file to me across a shared LAN and they offer to pipe the file over Netcat (and they just expect that I know what they mean) then they "rate". If I suggest Netcat and they understand they "rate". If they have no idea what I'm talking about or, worse, suggest a "cloud" service, then I file them appropriately.

Edit: Just to be clear, I'm talking about transient situations-- like when I'm working with another contractor on a day-long gig, etc. Obviously, for an established LAN piping files to each other over isn't a sensible or secure file transfer method.

I do not know why you are being down-voted. I would expect people to know what netcat is, and what it is used for. If all someone can come up with is related to cloud, then I would dismiss them, too. These "problems" have been solved a very long time ago, and we have great alternatives.

For myself I have written two shell functions; nc_send and nc_recv. It uses Nmap's ncat with SSL. It uses GPG and to verify data integrity, I use b2sum. Simple, yet perfect for the task. I use it often besides scp, but of course sometimes netcat is all I need.

I wouldn't necessarily "dismiss" somebody, but knowing about simple tools is a proxy in my mind for experience level. I can tailor my communication appropriately when I have some idea of experience level. If I know I can't say to somebody plugged-in to my laptop directly w/ a patch cable "Give me the last two octets of your APIPA address and start listening on port 31338 piped out to a file" then I know that there are a lot of other tasks that I'll need to break down in minute detail.

Okay, you are right. I would not dismiss them either for this alone, I would first perhaps ask them why they think that it is the best option, or what alternatives there are, and so forth.

> Give me the last two octets of your APIPA address

Is not APIPA Windows-only, by the way?

I can definitely give you two octets of an IP address through using awk, sed, or using C and bitwise operations. Do I pass? :D

APIPA was standardized as IPv4LL in RFC 3927[1]. I never remember the acronym IPv4LL-- I always remember APIPA instead. It was a Microsoft construct, but it has fairly broad OS support now, to my knowledge.

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3927

I am trying to transition myself from netcat to socat. It's wordier, but more versatile and complete.