Script to get the HTTP status code of a list of urls?

Curl has a specific option, --write-out, for this:

$ curl -o /dev/null --silent --head --write-out '%{http_code}\n' <url>
200

• -o /dev/null throws away the usual output
• --silent throws away the progress meter
• --head makes a HEAD HTTP request, instead of GET
• --write-out '%{http_code}\n' prints the required status code

To wrap this up in a complete Bash script:

#!/bin/bash
while read LINE; do
  curl -o /dev/null --silent --head --write-out "%{http_code} $LINE\n" "$LINE"
done < url-list.txt

(Eagle-eyed readers will notice that this uses one curl process per URL, which imposes fork and TCP connection penalties. It would be faster if multiple URLs were combined in a single curl, but there isn't space to write out the monsterous repetition of options that curl requires to do this.)

wget --spider -S "http://url/to/be/checked" 2>&1 | grep "HTTP/" | awk '{print $2}'

prints only the status code for you

Extending the answer already provided by Phil. Adding parallelism to it is a no brainer in bash if you use xargs for the call.

Here the code:

xargs -n1 -P 10 curl -o /dev/null --silent --head --write-out '%{url_effective}: %{http_code}\n' < url.lst

-n1: use just one value (from the list) as argument to the curl call

-P10: Keep 10 curl processes alive at any time (i.e. 10 parallel connections)

Check the write_out parameter in the manual of curl for more data you can extract using it (times, etc).

In case it helps someone this is the call I'm currently using:

xargs -n1 -P 10 curl -o /dev/null --silent --head --write-out '%{url_effective};%{http_code};%{time_total};%{time_namelookup};%{time_connect};%{size_download};%{speed_download}\n' < url.lst | tee results.csv

It just outputs a bunch of data into a csv file that can be imported into any office tool.

This relies on widely available wget, present almost everywhere, even on Alpine Linux.

wget --server-response --spider --quiet "${url}" 2>&1 | awk 'NR==1{print $2}'

The explanations are as follow :

--quiet

Turn off Wget's output.

Source - wget man pages

--spider

[ ... ] it will not download the pages, just check that they are there. [ ... ]

Source - wget man pages

--server-response

Print the headers sent by HTTP servers and responses sent by FTP servers.

Source - wget man pages

What they don't say about --server-response is that those headers output are printed to standard error (sterr), thus the need to redirect to stdin.

The output sent to standard input, we can pipe it to awk to extract the HTTP status code. That code is :

• the second ($2) non-blank group of characters: {$2}
• on the very first line of the header: NR==1

And because we want to print it... {print $2}.

wget --server-response --spider --quiet "${url}" 2>&1 | awk 'NR==1{print $2}'

Use curl to fetch the HTTP-header only (not the whole file) and parse it:

$ curl -I  --stderr /dev/null http://www.google.co.uk/index.html | head -1 | cut -d' ' -f2
200