Shell Programming and Scripting

My system does not have wget, curl and lynx. The chances are low that the SA would install them for me. Do I have any other way out? I need to invoke a few URL calls from my SHELL script.

Thought of using a PERL script or writing a simple Java client, but that adds in more dependencies.

Any idea?

if you have Python, you can use it's urllib2 library

Code:

#!/usr/bin/python
import urllib2
page = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.google.com")
result = page.read()
open("output.html","w").write(result) # write to output.html

Sorry, how do I know if I've python installed? Actually I just need to invoke an URL, thats all, no need to output it to a file.

you can type
# which python

or

# find / -name "python*".

For Perl, preferably LWP module is used for HTTP.

But for plain vanilla HTTP, if you can't really install LWP (note that you can download and install the module together with the script and not install it systemwide), a simple sequence of commands will do it:

Code:

use IO::Socket::INET; 
$http = IO::Socket::INET->new(
    PeerAddr => "www.unix.com:80",
    Proto => "tcp"
);
$http->print("GET /showthread.php?t=37182 HTTP/1.0\nHost: www.unix.com\n\n"); 
print $http->getlines();

which will display the HTML for this page. IO::Socket::INET is shipped standard with Perl, so you cannot say it is an "external dependency".

My URL call is actually invoking a servlet call. I don't really need to display any HTML. So does it mean that I should just omit this line of code?

Code:

print $http->getlines();

Unfortunately for me, Python is also not installed. Guess I'll have to use Perl then. Thanks!