Continuously send the content of a file through a server socket with netcat

Question

I have a linux machine which is listening for connections on port 4450. Where there is an incomming connection, this is supposed to send continuously over the socket the content of a file. Did you do this before ? What I've done so far was to send once the content of the file like this:

x=$(filename); echo $x | nc -l 4450

On the client side I have an Android app, which connects to the server and then using a BufferedReader gets the data from the stream and processes it.

Any help would be highly appreciated.

Thanks

Answer 1

Use socat instead of netcat (nc). With socat you can do almost everything that can be done with netcat . But socat has a lot more features and is easier to use.

socat TCP-LISTEN:4450,fork OPEN:/tmp/filename,rdonly

You can also use the output of a command instead of some file contents:

socat TCP-LISTEN:4450,fork EXEC:/bin/date