# Konsthol

> DATE: Sun 12 Sep 2021 00:53 By: konsthol@pm.me

# Awesome file sharing tool

Croc is one of the best easy to use file sharing cli tools I came across and only recently discovered how easy it can be to self host your own relay.

Croc as far as I understand needs an intermediary to staple as it says the connection between two computers. If I grasp the concept correctly if two computers can both connect to a third one then a connection between them can be established. The files sent over don’t get first uploaded to the third one and then downloaded to the second but somehow get uploaded and downloaded simultaneously.

I’ll have to further read about that but in short if you have a computer like a server with a static ip that is easily accessible from the internet then because of the great job the author did you can host a relay simply by typing the command

> croc relay

which will by default use the ports 9009-9013 but you can specify your own with the –ports arguement like

> croc relay –ports 1111,1112

Then if you make that into a systemd service (which I won’t be covering just yet cause I don’t really understand them and only make them by copy pasting basic templates 😐) it’s basically a set and forget kind of thing and you can now send files to anyone in any operating system by using croc by typing

> croc –relay “your.domain:9009” send [file]

and the recipient can download it by typing

> croc –relay “your.domain:9009” [code]

This is super useful cause there was a time when the public instance was down and I couldn’t send files when it was just so easy to not be dependent on the public instance in the first place.

You should definetely read more about it on Croc’s github page and set up your own relay asap 😎

https://github.com/schollz/croc

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