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Network tools

From ArchWiki

This page lists various network tools. ping and ip are covered by Network configuration.

Traceroute

Traceroute is a tool to display the path of packets across an IP network.

There are several implementations available:

tracepath(8) from iputils (required by base)
traceroute(8) from traceroute
MTR — Combines the functionality of traceroute and ping into one tool.

https://www.bitwizard.nl/mtr/ || mtr, mtr-gtk

Netcat

See also Wikipedia:Netcat.

Ncat — Netcat implementation from Nmap project.

https://nmap.org/ncat/ || nmap

OpenBSD netcat — TCP/IP swiss army knife. OpenBSD variant, with more features.

https://packages.debian.org/sid/netcat-openbsd || openbsd-netcat

A more complex alternative is socat.

Whois

See also Wikipedia:WHOIS. Since the 28 January 2025, registrars are no longer required to offer a WHOIS service. See #RDAP for its replacement.

whois — Intelligent WHOIS client.

https://github.com/rfc1036/whois || whois

jwhois — An Internet Whois client

https://www.gnu.org/software/jwhois/ || jwhois^AUR

RDAP

Registration Data Access Protocol (STD 95) is a newer protocol that officially replaces the WHOIS protocol per ICANN's 2023 Global Amendments. Registrars are required to implement RDAP as of the 03 February 2024.

OpenRDAP — Command line RDAP client implementation in Go.

https://www.openrdap.org/ || openrdap-client^AUR

inetd

Arch Linux does not have inetd but you can use systemd or xinetd (xinetd^AUR) instead.

See also

List of applications/Security#Network security