Shell Programming and Scripting

It's possible to emulate an HTTP connection using telnet, if you send the correct HTTP commands, eg

Code:

$ telnet www.yahoo.com 80
HEAD / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.yahoo.com
Connection: close
Accept: */*

You'll have to hit return twice (send an empty line) for the server to start processing.

Cool pludi. I have used similar techniques for email servers but never for http.

That's the nice thing about most of them old everyday protocols: it's all text. Be it SMTP, POP3, IMAP, HTTP, or FTP (those come to mind), you can do it all using just the telnet utility, if you know how. And you can learn the "how" by reading the appropriate RFC.

Yep. you just have to rehearse and be prepared to type at full speed!

Not really. Take SMTP and POP3 for example. Both support a help command showing you what commands that server supports and how to use them. Both won't automatically disconnect you unless you run into an timeout ('bout 60 seconds on the first servers I tried). Both are very forgiving on typing errors, and even let you reset the session should you really screw up. It's almost the same for HTTP or FTP. IMAP's a little more touchy since it wants some kind of sequence numbers for asynchronous processing, but that's just a little added annoyance.

Mostly used raw commands to delete oversize incoming mail. Have to be pretty da@mn quick to avoid timeout. Happened on several ISPs.