curl is amazing[0]. But I use maybe 10% of it. And AFAIK it can't be statically linked. Is there an alternative that includes mainly the HTTP functionality and is static?
Someone got a static build working on MacOS: https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/9359 (it looks like a pain, but certainly doable given enough time and dependency fiddling)
If you've got perl installed you'll might have a "GET" binary present, mine is /usr/bin/GET, which comes with the WWW-module.
Although this is written in portable perl, rather than being compiled, so the static vs. dynamic choice doesn't really mean much it is a simple alternative.
Otherwise I built a simple busybox-inspired collection of tools, written in golang, which includes a simple HTTP client too:
Those are just a couple of examples, I'm certain there are multiple other choices out there. But I guess curl is ubiquitous enough that most people just use it directly, and add it when missing!
If you control both ends, no big deal. If you're just working out some protocol, no big deal. I love simple toy solutions to problems, especially when understanding the problem space. But this is going to fall apart under any sort of pressure.
This was a joke to poke fun at people who comment "unnecessary use of cat", but yeah, it's bad on many levels.
However, in many simple cases, it will produce a valid response, since http server implementations are often extremely lenient. But I'd never use it because curl is truly everywhere.
That's not the same at all, because the nc example dumps the response headers to stdout and the curl example does not.
It's more similar to "curl -i perdu.com", except (on my system? maybe it's non-default) curl colourises the header names when output to a TTY, and prints a progress report to stderr when output to a non-TTY.
