alt Hacker News> As it turns out, bash can speak HTTP by itself.
No, it can not. Bash lets you open TCP sockets.
What you are doing here is trying to speak HTTP yourself, which is fine for testing and debugging, and hella cool for fun to do by hand, but you will shoot yourself in the foot if you try to use this pseudo http client unattended in reality. This toy code does not parse HTTP properly and will break.
You could of course write a full http/1.1 client in bash, you can even do a full http server in pure bash: https://github.com/bahamas10/bash-web-server
For less insane, non-bash shells there is always nc which is usually probably the wiser choice.
Replies
> No, it can not. Bash lets you open TCP sockets.
I thought you had to use a program called netcat for that--if not then what is the point of that binary? And for that matter, can't you also use telnet to manually send HTTP?
> No, it can not. Bash lets you open TCP sockets.
Very fair pushback -- I did get carried away and will update the article to be more precise. Thanks for raising it!
> For less insane, non-bash shells there is always nc which is usually probably the wiser choice.
For completeness, `nc` or any netcat equvialent I could think of was not available in the image I was trying this with. It would certainly be a better option though.
it's not that insane. i've been manually typing http requests in since before http/1.1 and the mandatory host header.
it is insane to use it for anything serious (also the opposite, implementing webservers in bash), but for quick testing it's pretty great!