Is it possible to read only first N bytes from the HTTP server using Linux command?

Question

Here is the question.

Given the url http://www.example.com, can we read the first N bytes out of the page?

• using wget, we can

Answer 1

curl  | head -c 499

or

curl  | dd bs=1 count=499

should do

Also there are simpler utils with perhaps borader availability like

    netcat host 80 <<"HERE" | dd count=499 of=output.fragment
GET /urlpath/query?string=more&bloddy=stuff

HERE

Or

GET /urlpath/query?string=more&bloddy=stuff