How To: Use TELNET To Send a GET And HEAD HTTP Request

This guide goes over how telnet can be used to send both GET and HEAD http requests. These commands can be useful when debugging a website for example finding out whether it supports caching or if the content is being encoded by gzip.

Step 1:

Before we are able to enter any telnet commands we first need to start a telnet session by starting it in a terminal.

Command:telnet

Telnet command

Step 2:

Now that we started telnet we are now able to pass a command in order to connect.

Command:o example.com 80‘ In the command above replace example.com with the website that you would like to connect to.

Response code / message: Trying #.#.#.#… > connected to example.com

Connect to server

Step 3:

As we are now connected to the web server we can start passing commands to it. In this example the two commands that will be used are:

Other requests types can also be made, for more information visit the specification page. The first command set is a HEAD request.

Command:HEAD /index.html HTTP/1.1

Command: Host: example.com‘ After entering the second command press enter / return again.

Response code / message: HTTP/1.1 200 OK

HTTP Head

The other command set that can be run is GET which is similar to the last.

Command:GET /index.html HTTP/1.1

Command:Host: example.com‘ After entering the second command press enter / return again.

Response code / message: HTTP/1.1 200 OK

HTTP Get

Full transaction

HEAD:

Full HTTP Head

GET:

Full HTTP Get