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 (serial line etc. or a pseudo terminal), a socket (UNIX, IP4, IP6 - raw, UDP, TCP), an SSL socket, proxy CONNECT connection, a file descriptor (stdin etc.), the GNU line editor, a program, or a combination of two of these. These modes include generation of "listening" sockets, pipes and pseudo terminals. socat can be used, e.g., as TCP port forwarder (one-shot or daemon), as an external socksifier, for attacking weak firewalls, as a shell interface to UNIX sockets, IP6 relay, for redirecting TCP oriented programs to a serial line, to logically connect serial lines on different computers, or to establish a relatively secure environment (su and chroot) for running client or server shell scripts with network connections. Many options are available to refine socats behaviour: terminal parameters, open() options, file permissions, file and process owners, basic socket options like bind address, advanced socket options like IP source routing, linger, TTL, TOS (type of service), or TCP performance tuning. More capabilities, like daemon mode with forking, client address check, "tail -f" mode, some stream data processing (line terminator conversion), choosing sockets, pipes, or ptys for interprocess communication, debug and trace options, logging to syslog, stderr or file, and last but not least precise error messages make it a versatile tool for many different purposes. In fact, many of these features already exist in specialized tools; but until now, there does not seem to exists another tool that provides such a generic, flexible, simple and almost comprehensive (UNIX) byte stream connector. packages -------- before bothering with compilers, dependencies and include files, you might try to get a binary distribution that matches your platform. Have a look at the projects home page for actual information regarding socat binary distributions. Binary packages with socat version 1.2 have been available for: RedHat Linux 7.2 / i386 SuSE Linux 7.3 /i386 FreeBSD 4.6 Debian Linux (unstable) OpenPKG Zaurus platforms --------- socat 1.3 was compiled and tested under the following operating systems: SuSE Linux 7.3 on i386 with kernel 2.4.10 AIX 5.1 on PPC with gcc 2.9 SunOS 5.8 on sparc with gcc 2.95.3 FreeBSD 4.7 MacOS X 10.1 on PPC Some versions of socat have been reported to successfully compile under older Linux versions back to RedHat 2.1 (kernel 1.2.13, gcc 2.7.0), under AIX 4.1 and 4.3, SunOS 5.7, FreeBSD 4.2 - 4.6, Cygwin, OpenBSD, and Solaris 8 on x86. It might well compile and run under other UN*X like operating systems. install ------- Get the tarball and extract it: gtar xzvf socat.tar.gz cd socat-1.3 ./configure make depend make su make install # installs socat, filan, and procan in /usr/local/bin For compiling socat, gcc (or egc) is recommended. If gcc is not available, the configure script will fail to determine some features; then you'd better begin with one of the Makefiles and config.h's from the Config directory. If you have problems with the OpenSSL library, you can apply the option "--disable-openssl" to configure. If you have problems with the readline library or (n)curses, you can apply the option "--disable-readline" to configure. If you still get errors or a tremendous amount of warnings you can exclude the features for system call tracing and file descriptor analyzing by applying the options "--disable-sycls --disable-filan" to configure. You still need the functions vsnprintf and snprintf. For other operating system, if socat does not compile without errors, refer to the file PORTING. platform specifics - solaris ---------------------------- If you have libreadline or libssl in a directory not usually searched by the loader, e.g. /opt/sfw/lib, you must add this directory to $LD_LIBRARY_PATH, at least for running configure and the socat executables, e.g.: export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/opt/sfw/lib:/usr/local/ssl/lib For some shell scripts, it is preferable to have /usr/xpg4/bin at a prominent position in $PATH. documentation ------------- socat.1 is the man page, socat.html is the HTML based man page. It is actual, but describes only the more useful options. xio.help is an older, but more comprehensive description in text form; some details are outdated, but it describes all address options. license ------- socat is distributed under the terms of the GNU GPL; except for install-sh, which is copyright MIT, with its own license; In addition, as a special exception, the copyright holder gives permission to link the code of this program with any version of the OpenSSL library which is distributed under a license identical to that listed in the included COPYING.OpenSSL file, and distribute linked combinations including the two. You must obey the GNU General Public License in all respects for all of the code used other than OpenSSL. If you modify this file, you may extend this exception to your version of the file, but you are not obligated to do so. If you do not wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, version 2 of the License This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. contact ------- For questions, bug reports, ideas, contributions etc. please contact socat@dest-unreach.org For socat source distribution, bug fixes, and latest news see: http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/ Cryptographic signatures and checksums may be provided by the developers at the URL(s) above. Wiretapped recommends that users check these before use of the software/information.