Proposal for ncat improvement

[Ulrich Heuser <heuser_uli () hotmail com>]

Dear all,
I found a relevant diff between the original netcat tool and ncat out of nmap:

On sending out a http-request by netcat the connection is kept alive for a long period, and this supports receiving a 
http-response from the addressed counterpart.

With ncat the connection is closed after 1 sec., and the comm. counterpart is not able to send a http-response to the 
ncat requestor after that amount of time.


It would be useful to extend the options of ncat by a keep-alive time-val. and to keep the connection open for such 
given period to allow receiving the response.


Pls. find an example from a DOS command-line window below, where
nc is the call to original netcat tool, and ncat the call to the corresponding tool out of the nmap suite:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
D:\Testing>nc -v 173.21.45.122 85 < scales.txt
testhost.intra.dev [176.21.45.122] 85 (?) open
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Length: 237

3.8
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<HULXMLRESP version="1.0.0">
        <CMD value="getweight" parcelid="JJD0400284610322818" userid="xxx" stationid="11" popid="01" >
                <WEIGHT scale="3.8" unit="kg"/>
        </CMD>
</HULXMLRESP>

G:\Testing>ncat -v 176.21.45.122 85 < scales.txt
Ncat: Version 7.70 ( https://nmap.org/ncat )
Ncat: Connected to 176.21.45.122:85.
Ncat: 240 bytes sent, 0 bytes received in 2.21 seconds.

D:\Testing>
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Uli Heuser

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