How to display request headers with command line curl
Solution 1:
curl's -v or --verbose option shows the HTTP request headers, among other things. Here is some sample output:
$ curl -v http://google.com/
* About to connect() to google.com port 80 (#0)
* Trying 66.102.7.104... connected
* Connected to google.com (66.102.7.104) port 80 (#0)
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> User-Agent: curl/7.16.4 (i386-apple-darwin9.0) libcurl/7.16.4 OpenSSL/0.9.7l zlib/1.2.3
> Host: google.com
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
< Location: http://www.google.com/
< Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
< Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2010 06:06:52 GMT
< Expires: Sat, 14 Aug 2010 06:06:52 GMT
< Cache-Control: public, max-age=2592000
< Server: gws
< Content-Length: 219
< X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
<
<HTML><HEAD><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8">
<TITLE>301 Moved</TITLE></HEAD><BODY>
<H1>301 Moved</H1>
The document has moved
<A HREF="http://www.google.com/">here</A>.
</BODY></HTML>
* Connection #0 to host google.com left intact
* Closing connection #0
Solution 2:
A popular answer for displaying response headers, but OP asked about request headers.
curl -s -D - -o /dev/null http://example.com
-
-s: Avoid showing progress bar -
-D -: Dump headers to a file, but-sends it to stdout -
-o /dev/null: Ignore response body
This is better than -I as it doesn't send a HEAD request, which can produce different results.
It's better than -v because you don't need so many hacks to un-verbose it.
Solution 3:
I believe the command line switch you are looking for to pass to curl is -I.
Example usage:
$ curl -I http://heatmiser.counterhack.com/zone-5-15614E3A-CEA7-4A28-A85A-D688CC418287
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2012 15:22:05 GMT
Server: Apache
Location: http://heatmiser.counterhack.com/zone-5-15614E3A-CEA7-4A28-A85A-D688CC418287/
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Additionally, if you encounter a response HTTP status code of 301, you might like to also pass a -L argument switch to tell curl to follow URL redirects, and, in this case, print the headers of all pages (including the URL redirects), illustrated below:
$ curl -I -L http://heatmiser.counterhack.com/zone-5-15614E3A-CEA7-4A28-A85A-D688CC418287
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2012 15:22:13 GMT
Server: Apache
Location: http://heatmiser.counterhack.com/zone-5-15614E3A-CEA7-4A28-A85A-D688CC418287/
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2012 15:22:13 GMT
Server: Apache
Set-Cookie: UID=b8c37e33defde51cf91e1e03e51657da
Location: noaccess.php
Content-Type: text/html
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2012 15:22:13 GMT
Server: Apache
Content-Type: text/html
Solution 4:
The verbose option is handy, but if you want to see everything that curl does (including the HTTP body that is transmitted, and not just the headers), I suggest using one of the below options:
-
--trace-ascii -# stdout -
--trace-ascii output_file.txt# file