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Is there some basic utility to open a specific network TCP port on my machine?

I need to test how my program deals with ports on listening state..

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occupy you mean about let an specific TCP port oppened on listen state? – Diogo Mar 7 '12 at 12:42
1  
This question makes no sense. A port is "closed" by default when nothing is listening on it. – Ingmar Hupp Mar 7 '12 at 12:43
This is what I want - some utility that will be listening on the port of my choosing and do nothing. – Vic Mar 7 '12 at 12:49

4 Answers

up vote 5 down vote

netcat should do what you want. Have it listen on you machine and echo stuff to STDOUT:

nc -4 -k -l -v localhost 1026

when you want it to close when the connection ends, don't use -k

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It works on Windows??? I tried this command here and it was not recognized. – Diogo Mar 7 '12 at 13:05
3  
I was going to post this as my answer! =p You can download netcat here: joncraton.org/files/nc111nt.zip It's a pretty old tool, but I think people failed to realize just how useful it can be. – ekaj Mar 7 '12 at 13:05
@Diogo Rocha You know it is a downloaded program, correct? – ekaj Mar 7 '12 at 13:06
1  
I didn't know... It would be nice if the answear post the link to download then... – Diogo Mar 7 '12 at 13:07
Reading comments generally helps as well – ekaj Mar 7 '12 at 13:08
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up vote 1 down vote

This is the perfect use for Wireshark, a packet and protocol analyzer which sits in-between the Windows/Linux networking stack.

It will allow you to view all TCP/UDP packets that are received by your entire machine, regardless of the port. You can also tell the program to filter out only packets sent across a certain port for further analysis. The advantage to Wireshark is that it provides very detailed messages for each packet - source, destination, port, MAC addresses, data, dates, checksums, etc. Very useful (and free!) tool.

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1  
humor me - since when when does Wireshark actually behave like a service listening on a port? It passively records the traffic. – Florenz Kley Mar 7 '12 at 13:20
@FlorenzKley you're right, it doesn't... I interpreted his question as how to view the network traffic on a certain port though, since wouldn't it be trivial for the O.P. to just run two copies of his program at once on the same port (to see what happens if another program is already listening on the port)? – Breakthrough Mar 7 '12 at 13:24
up vote 1 down vote

The netpipes tools faucet and hose have always served me well, simplifying stdin and stdout for my programs to use over the network.

Similar to netcat.

Ubuntu description:

The netpipes package makes TCP/IP streams usable in shell scripts. It can also simplify client/server code by allowing the programmer to skip all the tedious programming bits related to sockets and concentrate on writing a filter, or other service.

EXAMPLES
       This creates a TCP-IP socket on the local machine bound to port 3000.

       example$ faucet 3000 --out --verbose tar -cf - .

       Every  time  some process (from any machine) attempts to connect to port 3000 on this machine the faucet program will fork(2) a process and the child
       will exec(2) a

       tar -cf - .
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Thanks, but I need it for Windows... – Vic Mar 7 '12 at 13:49
Not even Cygwin? – Marcos Mar 7 '12 at 21:19
up vote 0 down vote accepted

I ended up writing an application in Java for this... Thanks everyone.

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2  
Maybe you can share it for others who are searching for a similar solution? – slhck♦ Mar 9 '12 at 18:27

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