I normally use HEAD(1) to view HTTP response headers. However, when developing web applications outside of Apache or any other standard web server, it's often likely that you won't immediately support HEAD requests. This is a problem if all you want to do is see the http headers.

Perl's libwww comes with a tool called lwp-request, which is installed with symlinks GET, HEAD, etc. You can use GET and have it show only the HTTP headers. Or can you?

The response message I am looking for is this:

HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Server: PasteWSGIServer/0.5 Python/2.4.3
Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2006 22:42:20 GMT
content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Connection: close

The response I get using GET -sed is:

200 OK
Connection: close
Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2006 22:43:16 GMT
Server: PasteWSGIServer/0.5 Python/2.4.3
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Client-Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2006 22:43:16 GMT
Client-Peer: 127.0.0.1:5000
Client-Response-Num: 1
Link: </css/style.css>; media="all"; rel="stylesheet"; type="text/css"
Link: </css/tabs.css>; media="all"; rel="stylesheet"; type="text/css"
Link: </css/tabs-ie.css>; media="all"; rel="stylesheet"; type="text/css"
Title: pimp: music for you.

What? LWP appears to be doing some html parsing. :(

So, a solution usiung netcat, which is trash, because lwp should just not be stupid by default. All I want are http headers. Here's my netcat solution:

% echo "GET / HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n" | nc localhost 5000  | col | sed -e '/^$/q'
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Server: PasteWSGIServer/0.5 Python/2.4.3
Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2006 23:00:12 GMT
content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Connection: close

Oh look! The headers I wanted. I hate you, LWP.

Sigh.