[basilikum]

> As it turns out, bash can speak HTTP by itself.

No, it can not. Bash lets you open TCP sockets.

What you are doing here is trying to speak HTTP yourself, which is fine for testing and debugging, and hella cool for fun to do by hand, but you will shoot yourself in the foot if you try to use this pseudo http client unattended in reality. This toy code does not parse HTTP properly and will break.

You could of course write a full http/1.1 client in bash, you can even do a full http server in pure bash: https://github.com/bahamas10/bash-web-server

For less insane, non-bash shells there is always nc which is usually probably the wiser choice.

[andelink]

Nice parameter expansion examples in that bash-web-server. It uses the $_ parameter in ways I hadn’t thought to before, often preceded by a single : ${x} line for pre-processing of the variable.

[a-dub]

it's not that insane. i've been manually typing http requests in since before http/1.1 and the mandatory host header.

it is insane to use it for anything serious (also the opposite, implementing webservers in bash), but for quick testing it's pretty great!

[bitmasher9]

Why wouldn’t you use curl for the quick test?

[hnav]

Sometimes you want to do something that curl cannot express, e.g. timing, protocol oddities, etc. For example you may want to issue a CONNECT to an echo server through a proxy and observe the bytes flowing back and forth. You may want to see what happens when conflicting hop-by-hop headers are specified without worrying about the client's (curl's) interpretation of them. A simple nc -c (or openssl s_client -crlf) lets you do all of that.

[a-dub]

because in those days there was no curl, or wget. and then when there was, there was no guarantee they'd be installed.

telnet was always there though. it also worked for speaking all the other plaintext internet protocols. (imap, pop, smtp, etc)

[dragontamer]

Note: Telnet is not completely plaintext and has control characters in the upper byte range (like 0xff or something, I forget).

Use nc or this TCP Bash technique if you really want to ensure decent compatibility when doing hacky solutions, otherwise a random 0xFF somewhere from a terminal console color change (or other control character) might really screw you over.

EDIT or ya know, use the correct tool like Curl.

[TZubiri]

>No, you can't write 10 lines of code, you have to import a 100k LOC dependency

Common misconception, if you want to replace a dependency on a swiss knife you don't need to implement a swiss knife, sometimes you can just implement the last helix of the corkscrew.

[cyanydeez]

it's curious what you'd be building where you think you can hit the reliability of curl with a bash script.

[pillmillipedes]

a script ten lines long perhaps?

[mrshu]

> No, it can not. Bash lets you open TCP sockets.

Very fair pushback -- I did get carried away and will update the article to be more precise. Thanks for raising it!

> For less insane, non-bash shells there is always nc which is usually probably the wiser choice.

For completeness, `nc` or any netcat equvialent I could think of was not available in the image I was trying this with. It would certainly be a better option though.

[bearjaws]

This is the most Claude pilled comment I've seen here.

[thih9]

This worries me. Some AI writing styles became mainstream; at first it was the em-dashes, now it’s “A, not B” patterns and excessive acknowledging. There will be more.

Was grandparent comment written by an LLM?

Or is this a human who copies a style they saw in a blog post, unaware that they’re copying an AI?

Or is this a human who spent too much time talking to an AI and now they just talk like this?

Or is this an organic human response and we’re all paranoid by now?

I don’t know which would be worse.

[elevation]

When learning a language, I've heard it's good to find a reference speaker, such as a prolific actor, and mimic them in order to absorb several aspects of what makes them sound authentic as a speaker, such as vocabulary, intonation, diction, pacing.

For many in the next generation of language learners, this reference will be Claude.

[8bitsout]

I'm going to go insane from all of this

[mrshu]

It's pretty rough to learn I sound like Claude. Will need to do something about it then.

(For what it's worth I did write the message above manually but I understand why no one would believe that now. At least I did not call netcat "load-bearing" [https://mareksuppa.com/til/load-bearing/] or something...)

[ffsm8]

I know that feeling

I notice myself getting afflicted with llm-isms after a full workday. And I didn't always notice, sometimes I only realize the day after...

Like it slowly siphoned out my soul, which then reconnected with me over night

[ed_elliott_asc]

Ok Claude :)

[nialv7]

what would be a non-pilled way of saying the same thing?

[xeyownt]

Yeah. The comments saying it's AI-pilled comments are more annoying and less informative than the comments themselves.

[WD-42]

Good point however netcat wasn’t available either.

[throwrioawfo]

Bro really replaced the em-dash with "--"

[mrshu]

An old habit that unfortunately makes one indistinguishable from LLMs these days...

[morpheuskafka]

> No, it can not. Bash lets you open TCP sockets.

I thought you had to use a program called netcat for that--if not then what is the point of that binary? And for that matter, can't you also use telnet to manually send HTTP?

[some_random]

nc is basically just a nicer interface for the same thing, in the same way that curl is.

https://linux.die.net/man/1/nc