Making Web Requests with NetCat

Using netcat

We already used curl to grab web pages, but netcat can do that too. However, netcat makes us do it a little more interactively.

First, run this command:

$ nc www.google.com 80

A blank line greets us because netcat is expecting some input. We’re going to craft our own HTTP request by hand. We type the following two lines:

GET / HTTP/1.1
HOST: google.com

Then, we press the “Enter” key once more to send a blank line, and we see the response from the server, including the headers and source code for the Google home page stream out to the screen.