En mi primer contacto con 'socat' pense que era como un 'netcat' a lo bruto, con muchas mas opciones, pero al pegar una mirada a su man me he quedado sorprendido por la increible flexibilidad de la aplicacion.

¿Cuantas aplicaciones conoces capaces de hacer esto?:

socat TCP4-LISTEN:5555,fork,tcpwrap=script \
EXEC:/bin/myscript,chroot=/home/sandbox,su-d=sandbox,pty,stderr

    A simple server that accepts connections (TCP4-LISTEN) and 
    fork's a new child process for each connection; every child 
    acts as single relay. The client must match the rules for 
    daemon process name "script" in /etc/hosts.allow and 
    /etc/hosts.deny, otherwise it is refused access (see "man 5 
    hosts_access"). For EXEC'uting the program, the child process 
    chroot's to /home/sandbox, su's to user sandbox, and then 
    starts the program /home/sandbox/bin/myscript. Socat and 
    myscript communicate via a pseudo tty (pty); myscript's stderr 
    is redirected to stdout, so its error messages are transferred 
    via socat to the connected client.

No esta nada mal pero.....¿cuantas conoces que tambien puedan hacer esto con la misma facilidad que lo anterior?:

echo |socat -u - file:/tmp/bigfile,create,largefile,seek=100000000000

    creates a 100GB sparse file; this requires a file system type that
    supports this (ext2, ext3, reiserfs, jfs; not minix, vfat). The 
    operation of writing 1 byte might take long (reiserfs: some minutes; 
    ext2: "no" time), and the resulting file can consume some disk space 
    with just its inodes (reiserfs: 2MB; ext2: 16KB)

Increible para ser siempre la misma aplicacion, y eso no es todo ¿editamos algo en hexadecimal?:

echo -e "\0\14\0\0\c" |socat -u - file:/usr/bin/squid.exe,seek=0x00074420

    functions as primitive binary editor: it writes the 4 bytes 000 014 
    000 000 to the executable /usr/bin/squid at offset 0x00074420 (this 
    is a real world patch to make the squid executable from Cygwin.

Esto es lo que yo llamo ser flexible, funcional y potente.