[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.

[Bender]

For what it's worth curl can do very detailed timing [1] and it can also do this using a proxy

    export http_proxy=http://your.proxy.server:port/

    export HTTPS_PROXY=https://your.proxy.server:port/

    curl -x http://proxy_server:proxy_port --proxy-user username:password

    or  $socks-wrapper curl # [2]

[1] - https://dev.to/gbhorwood/curl-getting-performance-data-with-...

[2] - torsocks, tsocks, wireproxy, shadowsocks-rust, proxychains-ng, etc...