Today Alan taught me some things about networking. IN PARTICULAR that you can transfer a file to your friend on your local network with netcat.

Also it is pretty fun to watch the transfer with Wireshark.

Here’s how it works:

I run

netcat -l 12345 > file.pdf or netcat -l -p 12345 > file.pdf

depending on my version of netcat. (BSD vs not-BSD or something)

You run netcat $MY_IP_ADDRESS 12345 < file.pdf

Then you wait a while until you think it’s probably done and stop it. And I have the file! That is all. Since you can see the whole thing in Wireshark, it is not secure or anything and anyone in the middle could also get the file. FUN.