Shell command to see the HTTP headers

Question

Is there a shell command to see the headers of a HTTP request?

For example, I would like to know what the headers retrieved from www.example.com/test.php are

How can I do this?

score 52 · Answer 1 · edited Nov 02 '20 at 22:32

52

In order to retrieve only the header, give this a try:

curl -I http://www.example.com/test.php

From the man page:

-I/--head
(HTTP/FTP/FILE) Fetch the HTTP-header only! HTTP-servers feature the command HEAD which this uses to get nothing but the header of a document. When used on a FTP or FILE file, curl displays the file size and last modification time only.

edited Nov 02 '20 at 22:32

Lucas

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answered Mar 20 '11 at 10:46

Dennis Williamson

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Also, `-D ` will save the headers to a file. – coredump Mar 20 '11 at 16:02

score 11 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 20 '11 at 10:18

11

Use wget for instance

wget -O - -o /dev/null --save-headers www.example.com/test.php

answered Mar 20 '11 at 10:18

Dmytro Leonenko

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yes, but i don't want to save the page on my pc.....i only want to see the headers – Damiano Mar 20 '11 at 10:22
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You won't save it with this command – Dmytro Leonenko Mar 20 '11 at 11:01
Yup, you're [just filling `/dev/null`](http://serverfault.com/q/232201/51929) :p `-O -` writes the headers to the stdout ("the console") – Lekensteyn Mar 20 '11 at 16:00
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Command outputs headers *and* full page to stdout. (Ubuntu 16.04, wget 1.17.1) – Frank N Aug 22 '18 at 08:42

score 8 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 20 '11 at 10:29

You can do that with curl:

curl -i 'http://example.com/'

Result:

HTTP/1.0 302 Found
Location: http://www.iana.org/domains/example/
Server: BigIP
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Length: 0

(for some reason, IANA decided to redirect example.com, result: no body)

curls manual page about the -i option:

-i/--include

(HTTP) Include the HTTP-header in the output. The HTTP-header includes things like server-name, date of the document, HTTP-version and more...

score 6 · Answer 4 · answered Mar 20 '11 at 19:09

Or you can use HEAD http://www.example.com. The result is very similar to that produced by curl -i 'http://example.com/' although it seems to return more headers.

200 OK
Connection: close
Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2011 19:08:58 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS)
Content-Length: 2945
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Last-Modified: Wed, 09 Feb 2011 17:13:15 GMT
Client-Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2011 19:09:08 GMT
Client-Peer: 192.0.32.8:80
Client-Response-Num: 1

score 5 · Answer 5 · answered Mar 20 '11 at 10:18

5

You can see them with curl.

answered Mar 20 '11 at 10:18

yojimbo87

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score 3 · Answer 6 · edited Mar 20 '17 at 10:16

Use curl --include to include the response-headers in the top of the response-body.

or curl --verbose to see it all including SSL certificate exchanging the handshake (plus other debug information)

if the request itself and neither the response-body are not of you concern, just use curl --head

for example curl --head --no-check-certificate --url "https://example.com".

You can download gnu curl already pre-compiled for the most platforms. curl is quite the useful too, especially if you would like to pipe or redirect the result inside a script.
*_{for example: https://superuser.com/a/1007898/429721}

Shell command to see the HTTP headers

6 Answers6