sending http from shell script

[Richard Mertz]

Anyone know how to send an http request from a shell script?

Richard

[James R. Ferguson]

Richard:

See if this meets your needs:

http://www.shelldorado.de/scripts/cmds/urlencode.txt

...JRF...

[Dan Hetzel]

Hi Richard,

As HTTP is plain ASCII text, you may use any 'echo' or 'print' statement to create an HTTP request or even a full HTML page.
To simplify coding, you may also use the 'here-document' mechanism like in
print << EOF
...
Your HTML code here
...
EOF

Type 'man sh-posix' and search for '<<' for details about the 'here-document'

Best regards,

Dan

[Rainer_1]

If you want to get a http page from the internet you could use wget to send a http request.

Look at:

http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/hppd/hpux/Gnu/wget-1.5.3/

[Richard Mertz]

OK, I should have been more specific. I am running a package that indexes our web site for searching. This works great for us for having the box index itself (it's in the DMZ). I would like to automagically produce an internal index that includes the web site in the DMZ. Because we are running websense (requires firewall login to get outside) I must somehow automatically log in to the firewall prior to running the indexing program. Websense generates a login screen after the first http request. So...I would like to send a bogus http request, followed by a login string. So, the first question I have is how do I echo something to the http port (80 in this case).

Richard

[Dave Kelly_1 · Accepted solution]

You need to use telnet for this.

telnet hostname 80 < /tmp/input.script

where /tmp/input.script contains something like

GET / HTTP/1.0

followed by a blank line.