Linux Ask!

Linux Ask! is a Q & A web site specific for Linux related questions. Questions are collected, answered and audited by experienced Linux users.

Dec 222010
 

Get HTTP request with nc command

Answer:

nc command is a very useful tool for network diagnosis, e.g. when you want to know the exact requests sent by your HTTP client (e.g. browser) to your web server, you can easy test with nc.

1. In your server, start nc and listen on port 80

# sudo nc -l -p 80

2. In your browser, type the server IP address.

3. In your shell, HTTP requests will be printed.

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090712 Firefox/3.5.3
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 115
Connection: keep-alive
Nov 082010
 

Emulate telnet using nc

Answer:

Telnet is a very useful tool for connecting to remote server, such as SMTP. However, you can replace the command telnet by nc, with the exact functionality.

Example: Connect to the local SMTP server.

# nc localhost 25