one line shuttle

A one line gawk script to transfer a file to a waiting netcat… it’s sort of a really crappy one-way netcat that you stuff things into.   I actually sort of needed this when on a suxx0r really stripped down busybox linux system that had zero file transfer programs, it was a wasteland… but the fools left gawk on the system… so a quick hack to do file transfers:

(The RS=’weird string’ meansset the record sep to something that doesn’t exist; awk will then treat the whole file as a single record.  This is for the weirdness of binary data.  An edit from an earlier version.)

If that line were in a shell script you’d say:

e.g.

And the netcat on 10.0.0.1 would look like:

You cold also redirect it to a file if wanted:

Or heck, write a one line gawk to receive:

run like:

Or hell, a really crappy netcat, sends and receives data, in 5 lines (damn those conditionals, I could toss an exit or something in there to do it shorter :)):

This beauty is a complete send and receiver, sort of netcatish. Well, a really bad netcat… sends a file, recieves a file via TCP on a given port. To recieve; on the host you want data:

To send; on the host you want to send data from:

Of course, who needs error checking?

Gotta love awk (props to gawk for adding net stuff ;)).   Unix-like-systems can rock even if really minimal.  And if you want to keep systems locked down or users from doing things you don’t want, you really want to keep them off your systems entirely.

p.s. At times awk/gawk isn’t binary clean… but BWK writes in ;login:

A standard example is binary data, since Awk expects everything to be text; for example, Awk survives these two tests

	awk -f awk		 "program" is raw binary 
	awk '{print}' awk	 input data is raw binary 

by producing a syntax error as expected for the first and by quietly stopping after some early null byte in the input for the second. The program generally seems robust against this kind of assault, though it is rash to claim anything specific.

Non-POSIX systems might need a bit of help – in the gawk manual it says:

There’s an environment variable called BINMODE that:

On non-POSIX systems, this variable specifies use of binary mode for all I/O. Numeric
values of one, two, or three specify that input files, output files, or all files, respectively,
should use binary I/O.