How to send the GET method to test a HTTP server

These days I had the problem that I wasn't able to connect to a http server. The problem was the firewall. I wanted to test the connection through port 80 by sending a simple GET to the web server. So the first attempt was to do a

$ telnet $host 80
GET / HTTP/1.0


<Here the response should be served ... but>

But the Problem with this (at least on debian) was, that the telnet client did not send a <CR><LF> combination which is needed by the HTTP server. Neither toggling the crlf option in the telnet client nor any known keybord sequence like ^M, ^J, enter, return, aso. did help. So what did the trick?

$ echo -e -n "GET / HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n" | nc $host 80

If you are interested in the HTTP protocol itself and the different methods I find the wikipedia to be a good starting point.