Linux tool to send raw data to a TCP server

Question

I am aware that this is not a direct \'development\' question but I need this info to test a development project, so I think someone could\'ve hit similar problem.

I

Answer 1

netcat or telnet, i have used both in the past to test simple text based protocols. netcat is more flexible.

Answer 2

From bash with dd:

dd if=/dev/zero bs=9000 count=1000 > /dev/tcp/$target_host/$port

or even with cat:

cat < /dev/urandom > /dev/tcp/$target_host/$port

Answer 3

Sounds like Expect may be what you want. There are implementations for multiple scripting languages, and you can script the requests/server responses plus appropriate timeouts, error handling etc.