Netcat stops when in a detached session

Question

I want to use netcat to dump a number of blocks of strings to a file. I've been running this in my linux terminal and everything works very well until I try to detach my command line. If I run my command as a detached session netcat stops after the first round of strings.

In short, this works:

nc localhost 3000 > test.txt

But this doesn't:

nc localhost 3000 > test.txt &
[1] 9040
max@starbuck ncats]$ 

[1]+  Stopped                 nc localhost 3000 > test.txt

I suppose this has to do with reaching the end of a send on the server side, but I don't know enough about netcat to tell it, "hey! stay awake until your connection drops"

Ideas? Thanks!!!

Answer 1

netcat wants to send its stdin across the socket and print out the response, so it expects to have them both connected and active. I don't know a good way of creating a command that waits forever, but you could try

sleep 86400000 | nc localhost 3000 > test.txt &

Answer 2

Some versions of nc support the -d option (noteably the OpenBSD version), which prevents it from trying to read from stdin.

So the code would become:

nc localhost 3000 -d > test.txt &