Usually, Tor works like that: a daemon starts in background, reads torrc and listens on SocksPort (usually 9050). Then an application uses localhost:9050 as a SOCKS5 proxy and performs requests over Tor that way.
What I want to do is to perform a request over the Tor network on GNU/Linux without starting localhost proxy. Something like torify curl, but without SOCKS5 proxies. So is there a way to send a request over Tor without using local proxy?
If you plan on using the standard tor implementation, then yes you will need to use some form of local proxy. If you don't want to bind the SOCKS port to a localhost address, you can also use a unix domain socket instead. For example using SocksPort unix:/home/user/tor-socks.unix.
If you want to avoid using a local proxy, then you will need to build the Tor client into the application itself. I don't know of any Tor libraries that do this, but the python torpy library might be a good start.
