# WHATPORT(70)

## NAME

port 70 — Gopher — Gopher — the pre-web menu protocol, still served by a small but real community of hosts.

Protocol: TCP  
IANA registry

## DESCRIPTION

RFC 1436 defines Gopher as a request/response protocol where the client sends a selector string followed by CRLF and the server returns either a file or a tab-delimited menu, one item per line, each carrying a type character, display string, selector, host and port. It has no cookies, no scripting, and no session state, which is much of its appeal to the people still running it. Floodgap's public server on gopher.floodgap.com has been up since 1999 and is the usual entry point. Servers such as Gophernicus keep the protocol maintained on modern systems.

## EXPOSURE

**Fine to expose.** A read-only, unauthenticated public publishing protocol with no credentials to leak; the risk is server-side path handling, not the protocol.

## CHECK

```sh
printf '\r\n' | nc -v gopher.floodgap.com 70 | head -20
```

## SEE ALSO

- spec — [RFC 1436 — The Internet Gopher Protocol](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1436.html) (rfc-editor.org)
- source — [Gophernicus server source repository](https://github.com/gophernicus/gophernicus) (github.com)
- iana — [IANA Service Name and Transport Protocol Port Number Registry](https://www.iana.org/assignments/service-names-port-numbers/service-names-port-numbers.xhtml) (iana.org)

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HTML: <https://whatport.net/70/> · JSON: <https://whatport.net/70.json> · full dataset: <https://whatport.net/ports.json>