socat is a powerful and versatile utility that can be used for a wide range of network-related tasks, including TCP port forwarding.
To use socat for TCP port forwarding, you can use the following command:
$ socat TCP-LISTEN:local_port,fork TCP:remote_host:remote_port
In this command, replace local_port with the port number on your local machine that you want to forward, remote_host with the IP address or hostname of the remote machine that you want to forward to, and remote_port with the port number on the remote machine that you want to forward to.
The fork option instructs socat to handle each connection in a separate process, allowing it to handle multiple connections simultaneously.
Here is an example:
$ socat TCP-LISTEN:8080,fork TCP:example.com:80
This command will forward all incoming connections to port 8080 on the local machine to port 80 on the remote machine example.com.
You can also use socat to forward UDP traffic, by replacing TCP with UDP in the command.
socat has many other options and capabilities that make it a powerful tool for network-related tasks. Refer to its manual page for more information on its options and usage.