HOWTO : Netcat on Ubuntu Desktop 12.04 LTS

Netcat is a featured networking utility which reads and writes data across network connections, using the TCP/IP protocol.

It is designed to be a reliable "back-end" tool that can be used directly or easily driven by other programs and scripts. At the same time, it is a feature-rich network debugging and exploration tool, since it can create almost any kind of connection you would need and has several interesting built-in capabilities.

Step 1 :

sudo -sH
cd /opt

wget http://garr.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/netcat/netcat-0.7.1.tar.gz

tar -xvzf netcat-0.7.1.tar.gz
rm netcat-0.7.1.tar.gz

cd /opt/netcat-0.7.1
./configure
make

cd /opt
mkdir /opt/netcat
cp /opt/netcat-0.7.1/src/netcat /opt/netcat/
rm -R netcat-0.7.1/

Step 2 :

To run it.

sudo -sH
cd /opt/netcat
./netcat -h

Remarks :

Please do not delete the built-in netcat-openbsd as it will also delete the ubuntu-mininal package at the same time. Your compiled netcat is different to the built-in one.