On: Command line tools every web dev needs to know

[sirn]

    $ curl -I news.ycombinator.com
    HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
    Cache-Control: private
    Connection: close

Keep in mind that this will fire a HEAD request to the server which, depending on web server you use in development, may not return the exact header you'd get with GET (IIRC, Jetty used to do this).

I like to use something like this in such situation:

    $ curl -s -D /dev/stderr news.ycombinator.com >/dev/null

[k33l0r → sirn]

You can also use the -i option which prints out the headers and the response body (which is perhaps a bit too noisy).

    curl -i http://news.ycombinator.com

[JonnieCache → k33l0r]

or

    curl -v https://github.com

which dumps everything. Including, handily, the HTTPS handshake.

[ralph → sirn]

I rarely find I use curl's -s without its -S, e.g. -sS. It seems curl's design is flawed in its definition of -s; perhaps it's historic and it was too late to change it.

[ajross → ralph]

The junk goes to stderr, so it won't impact anything but your screen when used from the command line. And sometimes (large transfers) you want that information. I think the default is sane. When you're using curl in a script you use -s, when you're using it interactively you want the diagnostics.

[ralph → ajross]

Yes, sometimes when it's a particularly large transfer I want a progress meter but I normally don't so it's in the way; perhaps when we all had modems. And from a script I'd still want to use -sS instead of -s because although the script is obviously checking curl's exit value the user wants to see curl's specific complaint before the script's own knock-on diagnostic.

    $ curl -s does.not.exist; echo $?
    6
    $ curl -sS does.not.exist; echo $?
    curl: (6) Couldn't resolve host 'does.not.exist'
    6
    $