Socat virtual serial port install#

To cut the talk short, many thanks to Gerhard Rieger, author of socat, for the following tips! To create a pair of VSP’s socat -d -d pty,raw,echo=0 pty,raw,echo=0Īnd that’s it! As long as the socat is running, you have a pair of VSP’s open (their names are printed by socat on initialization). Yes, it does have Ethernet debugging since ETS 14, but it’s a very unstable option.Įven if you’re using Ethernet debugging, it’s often much easier to have your embedded system in a virtual machine (VirtualBox, VMWare etc.), and do the debugging via virtual NIC. if you’re into embedded device programming, where many embedded development kits support debugging via serial link – PharLap in my case. See socat man page for more details.Ĭreating pairs of virtual serial ports (VSP), is quite often wanted feature, yet it’s hard to find a solution online (try Googling it)… Pair of VSP’s is very useful to have esp. One of the wonders you can do is creating pairs of “virtual” ports/interfaces/sockets etc., even hybrid pairs like port-socket, etc., where one (or both) ends of the pair can also be real objects. Sidenote: socat is actually #71 on the mentioned list, but since socat is a much enhanced version of netcat, which is #4, it seems to me logical to count socat as #4 also.

Socat virtual serial port install#

Socat is #4 on the Top 100 Network Security Tools list, available in most distro repositories (on Debian/Ubuntu sudo apt-get install socat does the trick), really light on resources, and very efficient. Socat (SOcket CAT) – multipurpose relay – is a command line based utility that establishes two bidirectional byte streams and transfers data between them.