Send UDP Packet to Memcached via Netcat

I am attempting to send the stats command to memcached via netcat, however, I am not getting anything back from memcached... I have tried echo "stats" > commands.txt nc -u 127.0.0.1 11211 < commands.txt I have also tried echo stats | nc -u 127.0.0.1 11211 From what I have read on the bottom of the Memcached Documentation , line 1176, the command when being sent might have to include Each UDP datagram contains a simple frame header, followed by data in the same format as the TCP protocol described above. In the current implementation, requests must be contained in a single UDP datagram, but responses may span several datagrams. (The only common requests that would span multiple datagrams are huge multi-key "get" requests and "set" requests, both of which are more suitable to TCP transport for reliability reasons anyway.) The frame header is 8 bytes long, as follows (all values are 16-bit integers in network byte order, high byte first): 0-1 Request ID 2-3 Sequence number 4-5 Total number of datagrams in this message 6-7 Reserved for future use; must be 0 My question is, How do I send the stats command via udp to Memcached using netcat?