BitchX
Free IRC client
title: "BitchX" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["unix-irc-clients", "free-irc-clients", "software-using-the-bsd-license", "free-software-programmed-in-c"] description: "Free IRC client" topic_path: "technology/operating-systems" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitchX" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0
::summary Free IRC client ::
::data[format=table title="Infobox software"]
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| name | BitchX |
| logo | BitchX logo - ACiD.png |
| caption | BitchX ANSI splash screen (one of several in rotation). |
| developer | Colten Edwards (panasync) and Kevin Easton (caf) |
| latest release version | |
| latest release date | |
| latest preview version | |
| latest preview date | |
| operating_system | Unix, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, Windows, OS X |
| programming language | C |
| genre | IRC client |
| license | BSD 3-clause license |
| website | |
| :: |
| name = BitchX | logo = BitchX logo - ACiD.png | screenshot = | caption = BitchX ANSI splash screen (one of several in rotation). | developer = Colten Edwards (panasync) and Kevin Easton (caf) | latest release version = | latest release date = | latest preview version = | latest preview date = | operating_system = Unix, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, Windows, OS X | programming language = C | genre = IRC client | license = BSD 3-clause license | website = BitchX is a free IRC client that has been regarded as the most popular ircII-based IRC client.{{cite book |last = Charalabidis |first = Alex |title = The Book of IRC: The Ultimate Guide to Internet Relay Chat |edition = 1st |date = 1999-12-15 |publisher = No Starch Press |location = San Francisco, California |isbn = 1-886411-29-8 |pages = 44–45 |chapter = Unix Clients: BitchX |chapter-url-access = registration |chapter-url = https://archive.org/details/bookofirc00char/page/44
On several occasions, BitchX has been noted to be a popular IRC client for Unix-like systems.
The latest official release is version 1.2.
BitchX does not yet support Unicode.
Security
It was known that early versions of BitchX were vulnerable to a denial-of-service attack in that they could be caused to crash by passing specially-crafted strings as arguments to certain IRC commands. This was before format string attacks became a well-known class of vulnerability.
The previous version of BitchX, released in 2004, has security problems allowing remote IRC servers to execute arbitrary code on the client's machine (CVE-2007-3360, CVE-2007-4584).
On April 26, 2009, Slackware removed BitchX from its distribution, citing the numerous unresolved security issues.
The aforementioned vulnerabilities were fixed in the sources for the 1.2 release.
References
References
- (June 17, 1999). "Opinion: Get online for (free) Linux support!". [[CNN]].
- Peter Loshin. (2004). "IPv6: Theory, Protocol, and Practice". Morgan Kaufmann.
- (2011-03-09). "bitchx: Detail: 3204631 - Add UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1 conversion in output text". SourceForge.net.
- [http://www.ircreviews.org/clients/bitchx.html Review:BitchX (Amiga)] {{Webarchive. link. (2018-12-07 , IRCreviews.org, Retrieved 2009-09-29 ("BitchX is favoured by many more experienced IRC users"))
- [http://www.osdir.com/Article4735.phtml A Day in the Life of #Apache] {{Webarchive. link. (2016-03-16 , OSDir.com (March 25, 2005), Retrieved 2009-09-29 ("XChat, mIRC, and bitchx are several popular clients"))
- [http://www.overclockersclub.com/guides/ircguide/ How to use IRC guide], Overclockersclub.com (Dec. 4, 2006), Retrieved 2009-09-29 ("There are many different clients available, some of the more popular ones include BitchX, XChat, Trillian, BeserIRC, Klient ....")
- [http://www.broadbandreports.com/faq/5165 What about P2P on *nix?], Broadbandreports.com (Sept. 13, 2002), Retrieved 2009-09-29 ("There are several IRC clients for Linux. Among the best are X-Chat and BitchX.")
- [http://www.linuxhelp.net/guides/bitchx/ BitchX Configuration Guide], Linuxhelp.net (last updated Sept. 19, 2003), Retrieved 2009-09-29 ("BitchX is one of the most popular IRC Client available today for *nix systems.")
- "BitchX wiki on GitHub: ANSI/UTF-8".
- Ryan Russell. (2002). "Hack Proofing Your Network". Syngress.
- (2009-04-26). "The Slackware Linux Project: Slackware Security Advisories". Slackware.com.
- ["SourceForge.net Repository - bitchx] Revision 5". sourceforge.net.
- ["SourceForge.net Repository - bitchx] Revisions 6, 7". sourceforge.net.
- ["SourceForge.net Repository - bitchx] Revisions 11, 12, 13". sourceforge.net.
::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::