No, it can not. Bash lets you open TCP sockets.
What you are doing here is trying to speak HTTP yourself, which is fine for testing and debugging, and hella cool for fun to do by hand, but you will shoot yourself in the foot if you try to use this pseudo http client unattended in reality. This toy code does not parse HTTP properly and will break.
You could of course write a full http/1.1 client in bash, you can even do a full http server in pure bash: https://github.com/bahamas10/bash-web-server
For less insane, non-bash shells there is always nc which is usually probably the wiser choice.
Ol' CGI [1] used to work by piping the request as stdin to a bin and piping stdout as response, it was the binary responsability to parse and write proper HTTP (or any other protocol). You could write your binary as Perl or PHP which had HTTP libraries for parsing and responding baked in. Or, and it was not that uncommon, to wire bash scripts to CGI-bin just for fun. But yes, it was always dangerous doing it
it is insane to use it for anything serious (also the opposite, implementing webservers in bash), but for quick testing it's pretty great!
I thought you had to use a program called netcat for that--if not then what is the point of that binary? And for that matter, can't you also use telnet to manually send HTTP?
Very fair pushback -- I did get carried away and will update the article to be more precise. Thanks for raising it!
> For less insane, non-bash shells there is always nc which is usually probably the wiser choice.
For completeness, `nc` or any netcat equvialent I could think of was not available in the image I was trying this with. It would certainly be a better option though.
exec 3<>/dev/tcp/example.com/80
printf 'GET / HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: example.com\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n' >&3
cat <&3
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2026 17:37:45 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
...
The main surprise was that Bash has /dev/tcp which lets you do the equivalent of an HTTP request with a bit of shell magic, for instance:
exec 3<>/dev/tcp/service/8642
printf 'GET /health HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: service\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n' >&3
cat <&3
Pretty cool!
In theory it has a couple of benefits. You don't have to re-deploy your image to patch CVE's in OS components if you don't have any OS components. And it provides some measure of defence-in-depth - one could certainly theory-craft a scenario where an attacker gains some limited control over your application and then uses some OS component to escalate.
These days if a security engineer is proposing my team adopt distro-less containers to receive these benefits, I would point out that we need to weigh them against the very real drawbacks of not having standard debugging tools available where and when weneed them. And also to consider the relative impact of other defence-in-depth measures they could be pursuing instead - such as any sort of network policy to limit network traffic.
So we start at compiling the codebase (Rust) against MUSL. That way we can run it with FROM scratch images.
If we need more tooling available at runtime, then we look at alpine, but still using MUSL.
If MUSL itself is proving problematic, or if some of the libraries we use need glibc then we can look at using some locked down image.
The cool part about FROM scratch images is that you'll never have to update your base image to address CVEs. Only your software and its (compiled) dependencies.
What's the benefit really, though? If you still need to be able to rapidly deploy a new image in response to a dependency CVE, what have you gained?
For what its worth, this container used `python:3.12.2-slim-bookworm` and I really would not expect that sort of an image to bundle `curl` -- even if it is intended for production.
I was really just trying to see if intra-container connectivity works, and this ended up being a very quick way of doing so. (The alternative being building and deploying a new image, which would likely take significantly longer.)
You said the image was Python, though? Using that is way easier and faster. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48558763
If all you need to know is that it can connect:
python3 -c 'import socket as s;s.create_connection(("8.8.8.8",53))'
or http:
python3 -c 'from urllib.request import*;print(urlopen("http://example.com").status)'