Using netcat with authenticated sessions

I’ve decided to move this blog to GitHub Pages. This will be the third move since this blog was started in 2007 on the Super Dimension Fortress and then to some cheap wordpress shared hosting.

In the following couple of weeks I’ll triage the old site and re-post anything that is still worthwhile to this blog.

In the meantime here’s an example of using netcat to do a HTTP request containing a cookie. For good measure parameter -p 24 forces the server to reply to the client on port 42.

#!/bin/bash
head="GET http://www.example.org HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: .example.org\r\nCookie: VALUE=ABC123;\r\nAccept: */*\r\nConnection: Close\r\n\r\n";
echo -ne $head | nc -p42 www.example.org 80
#=> Using port 42 for the reply.