Examples -------- Many examples can be found in /usr/share/doc/netcat-traditional/README.gz. The rest of this file collects some more that have been contributed by users. Encrypted File Transfer (courtesy of Tom Buskey ) Suppose you have an ssh tunnel, and you want to copy a file to the remote machine. You could just scp it directly, but that opens up another connection. The goal is to re-use the existing connection. You can use netcat to do this: When you SSH in, add -L 31000:127.0.0.1:31000 On the remote: nc -lvnp 31000 127.0.0.1 > file On the local: nc -v -w 2 127.0.0.1 31000 < file No extra overhead. TCP takes care of error correction. SSH has already encrypted the pipe.