What's the difference between torify, usewithtor, tsocks and torsocks?

Question

I want to use an external application with Tor.

I find 4 different commands for that, and I am not sure about their relations.

• usewithtor
• torify
• tsocks
• torsocks

What's the relation between those 4 commands/applications?

Answer 1

Most of the links you posted state the differences.

You should use torsocks.

• tsocks: Allows non-SOCKS aware applications to use a SOCKS proxy. No longer maintained.

  tsocks' role is to allow these non SOCKS aware applications (e.g telnet, ssh, ftp etc) to use SOCKS without any modification.

• torsocks: Similar to tsocks but designed for Tor specifically.

  Torsocks is the successor of tsocks and is still actively maintained.

• torify: Does different things depending on where you get it from. Old versions tried to use torsocks if available, and if not, use tsocks. As tsocks is not recommended, torify now wraps torsocks.

  torify is a simple wrapper that calls torsocks with a tor-specific configuration file. It is provided for backward compatibility; instead you should use torsocks.

• usewithtor: Uses torsocks with a default configuration. You should no longer use this as torsocks now does this directly. No longer maintained.