What advantages for the intended use cases does transfer.sh have over netcat invented 26 years ago? I know some people who have used nc for those entire 26 years to xfer files point-to-point from the command line.
Netcat has it's uses, but one of them is not guiding your friends and/or family through a terminal in order for them to receive some photos you took last summer vacation.
It excels at doing things "right now". If I have a terminal window open on a server in France and one in the US; then I can easily move that file. However, If I have to move my body to the target location before I can copy the file it doesn't work as well. (Need to jump through a few other hoops that make it more challenging.)
Protip: ALWAYS grab the hash of the file before you send it, and compare.
2nd Protip: Encrypt your file(s) before you send them.
Something like this is decent for moving a file at your leisure, or to give a copy to somebody else at their leisure.
Target PC opens a port and starts listening (outputting to file)
Sending machine establishes a connection to the listening port, and starts copying the file.
Example (hide a file transfer as DNS traffic)
Listening computer:
nc -l -u -p 53 > output.file
cat original.file > nc -u [destination ip address] 53
You can also use TCP. These are sneaky/simple ways to move files around. Downside: You need to poke a hole in a firewall, but options exist for that too.
ssh/scp downside: You need an account on target PC to connect to. nc downside: you need an open port on the listening PC.
- Your 'sending' snippet should use | instead of >.
- ports 1-1023 are privileged.
I thought that looked a bit wrong, but ignored my gut. Privileged port: I'm root anyway. =) I can't make it too easy on these kids.
1 tremendous advantage to netcat:
SPEED.
This is the only "real-world" way to test line speed. 0 overhead, no faffing about services.
If you can't get line-rate speed on your LAN with this your hardware needs to be looked at.
iperf is handy, netcat is raw and real.
So yeah, just being able to copy curl commands from a website certainly has value over configuring complicated commands.