Automating HTTP requests in Bash

Any serious discussion on making HTTP requests in a terminal must start with curl. The curl tool is a command-line tool used for transferring data to or from a server using various protocols such as HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and more. It is widely used in pentesting to interact with web applications, sending custom requests to uncover vulnerabilities. You can visit the curl website and learn more by visiting https://curl.se.

I believe that most pentesters would prefer to use a browser proxy such as ZAP or Burp, or Python scripts for web application testing. However, knowledge of using curl in a Bash shell comes in handy. While I was writing this chapter, someone I worked with reached out to me for my help recreating a Metasploit HTTP exploit module in Bash because they couldn’t install Metasploit or any Python modules in the testing environment. The testing environment did have Bash and common command-line tools such as curl installed.

Here are...