netcat | TCP/IP swiss army knife -- transitional package | Mehr ...
This is a "dummy" package that depends on lenny's default version of netcat, to ease upgrades. It may be safely removed.
netcat-traditional | TCP/IP swiss army knife | Mehr ...
A simple Unix utility which reads and writes data across network connections using TCP or UDP protocol. It is designed to be a reliable "back-end" tool that can be used directly or easily driven by other programs and scripts. At the same time it is a feature-rich network debugging and exploration tool, since it can create almost any kind of connection you would need and has several interesting built-in capabilities. . This is the "classic" netcat, written by *Hobbit*. It lacks many features found in netcat-openbsd.
