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lisak
Asked: 2011-01-23 19:06:15 +0800 CST

Best way to check out body content of http POST request on linux

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I'm using ngrep for checking out http headers, I've never managed to get something transparent out of tcpdump and I don't like GUI apps like wireshark. ngrep is great, but I can't seem to find a way to grep headers of POST requests and content of their bodies ... Could please anybody tell me how to do that, or suggests some other methods of printing headers and content of POST request bodies ?

linux http request

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    What is the ngrep command that you're using? The following will show you the body of POST requests (assuming the standard port 80).

    ngrep "POST" tcp and port 80

    Keep in mind that frequently POST data is encoded in some binary format (often gzip for compression) so you won't be able to read it just by watching the ngrep output.

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  2. You might want to look at curl. There is a -D option that will dump the HTTP headers out to a file for inspection. There are also a ton of other options that might be useful, depending on what you're actually trying to accomplish.

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