ircdog is a tool for connecting to IRC servers and sending and receiving raw IRC protocol lines, similar to telnet or netcat, but with additional features:
- Automatically responds to
PING, keeping the connection alive without active user input (-pdisables) - Renders IRC formatting codes for terminal display (
--rawdisables) - Supports connecting to servers over plaintext, TLS, or WebSocket
- Can run as an intercepting proxy between another client and the server
- Can produce a transcript of raw traffic
- Supports escape sequences to easily send arbitrary binary data (
--rawdisables) - Supports scripted connection initiation and automatic reconnection
- Supports TLS client certificates
ircdog is primarily intended for IRC protocol developers who need to debug client or server behavior.
For more details, see the online help: ircdog --help
For instructions on how to build from source, see DEVELOPING.md.
ircdog is licensed under the attached ISC license.