Shell command to see the HTTP headers

Solution 1:

In order to retrieve only the header, give this a try:

curl -I http://www.example.com/test.php

From the man page:

-I/--head
(HTTP/FTP/FILE) Fetch the HTTP-header only! HTTP-servers feature the command HEAD which this uses to get nothing but the header of a document. When used on a FTP or FILE file, curl displays the file size and last modification time only.

Solution 2:

Use wget for instance

wget -O - -o /dev/null --save-headers www.example.com/test.php

Solution 3:

You can do that with curl:

curl -i 'http://example.com/'

Result:

HTTP/1.0 302 Found
Location: http://www.iana.org/domains/example/
Server: BigIP
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Length: 0

(for some reason, IANA decided to redirect example.com, result: no body)

curls manual page about the -i option:

-i/--include

(HTTP) Include the HTTP-header in the output. The HTTP-header includes things like server-name, date of the document, HTTP-version and more...