Redirect stdin and stdout to ports

Question

I'd like to take a program P that reads from stdin & writes to stdout, but connect it to nc or whatever such that it reads from a certain port and outputs to another port.

# The reading is easy, here P reads from port 50505
nc -l 50505 | P

How do I get it to write back to say port 60606?

Answer 1

I you mean that someone may open 2 TCP connections to your machine, one to port 50505 and another to port 60606, send data on the first one intended to be fed to P and expect to read the output of P from the second TCP connection, then that would be:

< /dev/null nc -q -1 -l 50505 | P | nc -l 60606 > /dev/null

Or with socat:

socat -u tcp-listen:50505,reuseaddr - | P | socat -u - tcp-listen:60606,reuseaddr

For P to send its output back to the same connection:

socat tcp-listen:50505,reuseaddr exec:P

Answer 2

You don't need nc in order to work with ports. bash can do that itself:

Bash handles several filenames specially when they are used in redirections, as described in the following table:

/dev/fd/fd
    If fd is a valid integer, file descriptor fd is duplicated.
/dev/stdin
    File descriptor 0 is duplicated.
/dev/stdout
    File descriptor 1 is duplicated.
/dev/stderr
    File descriptor 2 is duplicated.
/dev/tcp/host/port
   If host is a valid hostname or Internet address, and port is an integer 
   port number or service name, bash attempts to open a TCP connection to
   the corresponding socket.
/dev/udp/host/port
    If host is a valid hostname or Internet address, and port is an integer 
    port number or service name, bash attempts to open a UDP connection to
    the corresponding socket.