Tool for listening on a network port and forwarding data to an application?

grayFalcon · 10-07-2009, 02:47 AM

Hello everybody!

May be that I have gotten things mixed up, but I seem to recall there being some program that was able to listen on a specified port and to run a specified program whenever something came in on that port... But I just can't find what the name of this tool was. And before I start rolling my own solution, I thought I'd ask if anyone knows of this

Thanks a lot in advance,
-grayFalcon

acid_kewpie · 10-07-2009, 02:51 AM

What kind of thing? is this meant to be sniffing data, or something dedicated? iptables can watch a tcp connection and match strings, it's then possible to push that out to a log to watch and execute based on... or netcat is a simple way to recieve data and pass to a script for inspection.

grayFalcon · 10-07-2009, 03:11 AM

Well, what I have is an application that takes a bit of data and prints out a result. I remember that there was some tool that I could tell to listen on port X, and when data comes in, to do something with this data (in my case: write it to a file and start the application).

Basically I'm looking to create a very lightweight web servicey thing, and I thought there was something lighter than a full web server for doing this.

acid_kewpie · 10-07-2009, 04:04 AM

well yeah, you can make netcat listen and pipe the output to whatever you want. That way can lie security risks of course... but it's amazingly simple to do. Also trivial to run a perl / python / etc. script to listen on a port and process incoming data too plenty of examples online to modify.

grayFalcon · 10-07-2009, 04:09 AM

Thanks, netcat was what I'm looking for

I already have python scripts doing more complex stuff (where session handling and such is necessary), but I was hoping to get around this, since the current problem is pretty trivial. I don't like using a tank to shoot flies

Thanks a lot again,
greets,
-grayFalcon