bidilink [-v|--verbose] STREAM1 [STREAM2] bidilink -h|--help

bidilink is a general purpose Unix tool for linking two bidirectional data streams together. It extends the standard Unix "filter" paradigma to bidrectional streams.

bidilink has support for several different drivers which may be connected. You have to specify at least one, at most two of them on the command line. If you specify just one driver the second is automatically set to std:, which is the combination of the process' STDIN and STDOUT.

Besides the order of initialization there is no difference in specifying the stream specifications in a different order.

std: The process STDIN and STDOUT pipes. If you connect the std: driver with itself, strange things may happen.

exec:PROGRAM Fork off a process and use its STDIN and STDOUT pipes.

tty:DEVICE Open a TTY device (like /dev/ttyS0). If you want to change TTY parameters (like baudrate) do so by calling previous to running bidilink.

pty:[PTYSYMLINK] Open a pseudo TTY (PTY) as master and create a symbolic link to the slave device. If you omit the symlink path the name of the PTY slave is written to STDERR.

tcp-client:HOSTNAME:PORT Connect a TCP socket to a remote host.

tcp-server:[IPADDRESS:]PORT Listen a local port and wait for an incoming connection. You may specify an IP adress to listen on. If you omit that the default of 0.0.0.0 is selected, i.e. listen on all local IP adresses. This driver is limited to a single connection. After an incoming connection was established bidilink will close the listening port.

unix-client:SOCKNAME Make a stream connection to a local Unix socket.

unix-server:SOCKNAME Listen on a local Unix socket. This driver is limited to a single connection in the same way as tcp-server:

bidilink was written by Lennart Poettering <@PACKAGE_BUGREPORT@>. bidilink is available at

This man page was written using by Oliver Kurth.