One Thing Well

“ncp” is a utility for copying files in a LAN. It has absolutely no security or integrity checking, no throttling, no features, except one: you don’t have to type the coordinates of your peer.

Basically it works like this:

1. You and your buddy want to play Quake
2. Your buddy has a level that you don’t have
3. He types npush filename and waits. npush sends out UDP announcement packets proclaiming that someone wants to send something
4. You type npoll. npoll waits until it sees one of these packets.
5. The files are copied with tar over a TCP socket, so permissions and file dates (and if you are root, owners) are preserved.