In our home we have a mix of Mac and Linux computers. My children have a Raspberry Pi in their room and I have a Mac at my desk. Today we chatted with each other through the Terminal running on both computers.

Hi children!
Dudududududududu
Am I talking to a bird?
^v^

(It was a very interesting conversation as you can see)

How to chat using netcat

You can chat between two Unix computers (e.g. Linux or Mac) only using the Terminal and netcat command (i.e. the command nc). The netcat command is slightly different on the two OS'es, but I'll write the variation in comments.

First, you open a terminal window on both computers:

On a Mac, open e.g. the Terminal application

Now, choose one computer to listen (computer #1) and the other to connect to the first (computer #2). We chose that my Mac would listen and the childrens Raspberry Pi would connect.

Set up the listening computer

On the first computer, start netcat listening for incoming messages on port 23456 (or whatever port you prefer). You'll see that the command is slightly different on Mac and Linux.

# On Mac: nc -l <PORT>
nc -l 23456
# On Linux: nc -l -p <PORT>
nc -l -p 23456

Check the IP address of the listening computer:

ifconfig

Look for an entry called "inet", which looks something like this:

...
inet 192.168.1.101 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255
...

Shout the IP address you found into the house for all to hear!

Hey, I'm listening on port 23456 and my IP address is 192.168.1.101 !!!

Remember to shout the IP address you found, not the one I wrote above, since yours will probably be different... Now this computer is ready to chat!

Set up the connecting computer

On the second computer, use netcat to connect to the "listening" computer, using the IP address and port that the other person shouted to you.

# Mac/Linux: nc <IP ADDR> <PORT>
nc 192.168.1.101 23456

Again, rememember that the IP address above is just an example. Most likely, the person shouted different numbers to you.

Now the fun part: chat!

Now either computer you can type messages and hit enter. The thing you typed will appear on the other computer. Remember to finish your message by hitting the enter key.

hi, how are you? <enter>

After you hit enter, the message will appear on the other computer, where the person might reply:

hi, how are you?
I am fine thank you. How are you doing? <enter>

Experiment

After you have exchanged a few pleasant greetings, you can start hacking. For example:

• What happens if you receive a message while you are typing?
• Does the output always look the same on both computers?
• What happens if you send special characters (e.g. apple character on a Mac)?
  • You can generally type special characters by using modifier keys, such as alt/option. E.g. to type an Apple icon on a Mac (Danish keyboard) you'll hit option + $/§.

When you are done chatting you can exit netcat with ctrl + c. It doesn't matter who does this first, the other side will exit as well.