All of those things can be done with almost any UNIX-like OS, including the amazing FreeBSD. Personally, I’d say FreeBSD is better, because it actually comes with netcat as part of the base OS :)

As for xargs/find, it is truly awesome. I think spending a day learning and practising find/xargs combos is essential for the noobies. Hmm, I’ll just go add that to our onboarding plan…
Expanding that find to work with files that have spaces in their paths/filenames is a little bit trickier, but a cool trick (made necessary due to grep -l not having a null separated output :)

find /usr/src -type f -name ‘Makefile’ -print0 | xargs -0 grep -Fl ’1.6′ | tr ‘\n’ ” | xargs -0 kate

The only thing really wrong with that line now in my mind, is that ‘vim’ has been incorrectly spelled ‘kate’ :)

http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/

With some more code, you could use KDE’s DCOP to further automate amazing thing #2. I’ve been using it recently to auto reload a PDF I’m working on that KDPF for some reason doesn’t want to reload automatically when the file changes. Once kate is running, you could invoke DCOP to script kate to do certain things, if the interfaces are exposed. I just spent two minutes tab-completing $dcop kate… to see what’s available, and I could get kate to search, but not to seek to the match. hmm.