I want to Telnet to a web server from my Linux operating system (Ubunto) e.g. "google.com" and retrieve the index page. Then may be Send a search query via Telnet and see what do i get. I am not sure which add-on i require and what procedure to follow. i am using Ubunto

Hi there,

none at all, in theory. You just have to "speak" HTTP. For example, try "telnet www.google.com 80", then you're connected to one of Google's web servers. Now talk:
After the double enter, the server should reply with a bunch of HTTP header lines, the first of which would be:
After the first blank line, the actual response data starts, which should be an HTML document here.

As I said: In theory.
In practise, Google is a bad example, because they require some more HTTP header lines in the request - AFAIK the most important one is a User-Agent that looks like a real browser. But you may try that with some other plain vanilla HTTP server. That's just the way HTTP works.

Please note: That popular distribution is called Ubuntu (with a 'u' at the end).

[X] Doc CPU

1 members found this post helpful.

Why not use a text web browser like lynx?

Kind regards

Hi there,

there had to be that answer sooner or later! ;-)

If it makes sense depends on what hshah really wants. If he's into lightweight, quick retrieval of online information without being annoyed by all the bells and whistles like ads and pseudo-friendly gimmicks, your suggestion is probably a good one. However, in that case he could just as well take a popular and widespread browser like Firefox or Opera and disable Javascript, CSS and display of images.

I thought that the OP might rather be interested in what browser and server are talking behind the scenes, and that would remain hidden with Lynx as well - or can you build arbitrary requests and view all HTTP response headers with Lynx? Probably not.

[X] Doc CPU

It's never obvious whether questions like this are demonstrating some undeveloped enlightenment, or full naivete. I like to take the optimistic approach, and assume there is some well-reasoned basis for the question. On that basis, I will suggest creating an HTTP client in a scripting language, such as Perl. This is easily done with the example code in the lib-www-perl module on CPAN. Even if the OP doesn't elect to write anything in Perl, there is enough information about the underlying mechanisms there to contribute to a successful venture using telnet.
--- rod.