Can I use wget to check , but not download

Can I use wget to check for a 404 and not actually download the resource? If so how? Thanks

Solution 1:

There is the command line parameter --spider exactly for this. In this mode, wget does not download the files and its return value is zero if the resource was found and non-zero if it was not found. Try this (in your favorite shell):

wget -q --spider address
echo $?

Or if you want full output, leave the -q off, so just wget --spider address. -nv shows some output, but not as much as the default.

Solution 2:

If you want to check quietly via $? without the hassle of grep'ing wget's output you can use:

wget -q "http://blah.meh.com/my/path" -O /dev/null

Works even on URLs with just a path but has the disadvantage that something's really downloaded so this is not recommended when checking big files for existence.