fix: add human-readable error when nc is not installed on the host

Signed-off-by: Kanishk Pachauri <[email protected]>

hack/test-port-forwarding.pl

@@ -20,8 +20,24 @@
 use Socket qw(inet_ntoa);
 use Sys::Hostname qw(hostname);
 
+# check for nc
+sub check_netcat_installed {
+ my $nc_path = `which nc 2>/dev/null`;
+ chomp $nc_path;
+ unless ($nc_path) {
+ die "Error: 'nc' (netcat) is not installed on the host system.\n" .
+ "Please install netcat to run this test script:\n" .
+ " - On macOS: brew install netcat\n" .
+ " - On Ubuntu/Debian: sudo apt-get install netcat\n" .
+ " - On RHEL/CentOS: sudo yum install nmap-ncat\n";
+ }
+}
+
 my $instance = shift;
 
+# Check for netcat before proceeding
+check_netcat_installed() unless -f $instance;
+
 my $addr = scalar gethostbyname(hostname());
 # If hostname address cannot be determines, use localhost to trigger fallback to system_profiler lookup
 my $ipv4 = length $addr ? inet_ntoa($addr) : "127.0.0.1";