Getting curl to output HTTP status code?

I'm using curl at the command line on Linux to issue HTTP requests. The response bodies are printed to standard out, which is fine, but I can't see from the man page how to get curl to print the HTTP status code from the response (404, 403 etc). Is this possible?

Solution 1:

This should work for you if the web server is able to respond to HEAD requests (this will not perform a GET request):

curl -I http://www.example.org

As an addition, to let cURL follow redirects (3xx statuses) add -L.

Solution 2:

A more specific way to print out just the HTTP status code is something along the lines of:

curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" http://www.example.org/

A lot easier to work with in scripts, as it doesn't require any parsing :-)

The parameter -I might be added to improve response load performance. This will change the call to a HEAD call which will fetch response overhead only, without the body.

Note: %{http_code} returns on first line of HTTP payload

i.e.:

curl -s -o /dev/null -I -w "%{http_code}" http://www.example.org/