[colug-432] nc replacement in RHEL7?

[Rob Funk]

Rick Hornsby wrote:
> RHEL 7 changed a bunch of stuff.  One of the more annoying things is
> what the nmap folks did to nc.

> Other than rolling your own C app (which I did) and dropping it
> somewhere, are there any easy/accessible replacements for nc -z?  By
> easy, I mean not writing a mini perl script, and by accessible I mean
> maybe something that's already part of or installable from the RHEL
> repo.  Basically, I want the old nc (or some equivalent) back.

Is downloading and compiling source code considered accessible enough?

Wikipedia says there are lots of variations of netcat:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netcat#Ports_and_reimplementations
(FWIW, Ubuntu 14.04 has both netcat-openbsd and netcat-traditional.)

I don't have a RHEL7-based system handy, but maybe it has "socat"?
(CentOS 6.4 has socat, so maybe that was preserved in RHEL7 even if
the old netcat wasn't.)

  socat - TCP:127.0.0.1:80 < /dev/null && echo Connection succeeded 1>&2