Is it amazing things you can do with a simple Bourne Again Shell (bash).
I have just discovered you can open socket using a small redirection syntax, and emulate small checks you normally do with curl or wget.
The bash shell manual is always poor about examples, and this is very very sad.
In my own opinion, a good tool without a good set of examples is futile.
Crap software is still alive because is well documented.
Remember it
(and for bash, look also at:
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=gmail&q=using%20bash%20%2Fdev%2Ftcp%2F)