CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxcurl
Ankur Agarwal
Ankur Agarwal

Reputation: 24758

curl usage to get header

Why does this not work:

curl -X HEAD http://www.google.com

But these both work just fine:

curl -I http://www.google.com

curl -X GET http://www.google.com

Upvotes: 77

Views: 198373

Answers (3)

bovender
bovender

Reputation: 1960

curl --head https://www.example.net

I was pointed to this by curl itself; when I issued the command with -X HEAD, it printed:

Warning: Setting custom HTTP method to HEAD with -X/--request may not work the 
Warning: way you want. Consider using -I/--head instead.

Upvotes: 58

dmc7z
dmc7z

Reputation: 1697

You need to add the -i flag to the first command, to include the HTTP header in the output. This is required to print headers.

curl -X HEAD -i http://www.google.com

More here: https://serverfault.com/questions/140149/difference-between-curl-i-and-curl-x-head

Upvotes: 128

SheetJS
SheetJS

Reputation: 22905

google.com is not responding to HTTP HEAD requests, which is why you are seeing a hang for the first command.

It does respond to GET requests, which is why the third command works.

As for the second, curl just prints the headers from a standard request.

Upvotes: 4

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