twm’s blog: A web server as a shell script in a single line

I just found this via Heise online:

Web server in one line of bash

I tried it and it works!

while true; do { echo -e 'HTTP/1.1 200 OK\r\n'; cat index.html; } | nc -l 8080; done

You can replace index.html with any file you happen to want to transfer (also works for binary files).

After executing this, just point your browser to

whateverhostname:8080

and it will start downloading the file or in the case of index.html, will display it.

This is some serious case of genius!