bash script with network request in pure lsb environment

Question

From what I can understand of LSB documentation, neither wget or netcat are standard tools always available in an LSB environment.

Is there some other way to make a http request without being dependent on anything else than LSB?
What would be the most safe tool to be dependent on if I want to make it as simple as possible for users of my tool?

Answer 1

LSB is just Linux - and that might be an embedded device with not network at all. So there is no need to define HTTP in LSB.

Apart from that wget should be pretty standard in most distributions (e.g. SuSE uses wget in SuSEregister). Another tool might be curl - but you can not depend on these tools being available.

So if you want to use it - build a proper package and define a dependency (required: wget).

I see no other way for this.

Answer 2

I see that the LSB includes both Perl and Python...Python, at least, includes http tools in the standard library. I didn't investigate to see if the LSB mandates libwww-perl.

If you don't want to write anything yourself and you're happy with output to stdout, you can do this:

python -murllib http://example.com/

And if you're feeling really motivated, you can write a simple http client in bash.