Try this:

curl -i http://zedshaw.com/

You see the headers?

Ok, now try this:

curl -i "http://zedshaw.com/this has spaces in it.txt"

No headers, and it's a 400. This means that it defaults to a 200 status code, meaning that it breaks quite a few things about HTTP.

The feature should either be:

* Always return headers, no matter what.

OR

* If you want to save time on a malformed request, and headers are too much work, then just close the connection. That's still valid and will work with most clients.

Thanks!

This looks more like a bug. Stable release does it do too, not that any normal browser allows spaces in urls (they will be encoded).

Ok, correction: this isn't a bug. When you send a completly illegal request header (you can't have spaces in the url, just url encoded space), nginx can't read the HTTP version (GET http://zedshaw.com/this has spaces in it.txt HTTP/1.1). By that nginx thinks it is a pre 1.0 HTTP request (0.9), and then the server shouldn't sent headers. So what nginx doing is completly logical and correct on this request.