Get a Single Header with cURL

By  on  

Debugging third party apps can be difficult for a variety of reasons.  You take for granted that the third party has not only properly coded their app but that their server is also serving files properly.  As more a developer than a sysadmin I tend to spend a long time on the code before I ensure the server stuff is correct.  One mistake often made on the server side is not sending correct Content-Type headers with content, especially audio and video files, and that can cause a real problem for the app or codec trying to do something with the content.  These days I check response headers before I do anything else.

Getting complete response headers with cURL is easy:

#  Get response headers
curl -I https://davidwalsh.name

#  Result:
#  HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
#  Date: Wed, 03 Feb 2016 17:29:51 GMT
#  Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
#  Connection: keep-alive
#  Set-Cookie: __cfduid=dab1e532a38b35ce7d764344217ddd8dc1454520590; expires=Thu, 02-Feb-17 17:29:50 GMT; path=/; domain=.davidwalsh.name; HttpOnly
#  Location: https://davidwalsh.name/
#  Cache-Control: max-age=1
#  Expires: Wed, 03 Feb 2016 17:29:52 GMT
#  Vary: Accept-Encoding
#  Server: cloudflare-nginx
#  CF-RAY: 26efdc3d2aa841ef-MSP

But that's a lot of info to sift through if you only want the one header.  Here's how you can retrieve just one header:

#  Get single header only
#  curl {url} -I | grep -Fi {header_name}
curl https://davidwalsh.name -I | grep -Fi Content-Type

#  Result:
#  Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

With the extra grep above you'll only get the one header back.  Simple!

Recent Features

  • By
    Page Visibility API

    One event that's always been lacking within the document is a signal for when the user is looking at a given tab, or another tab. When does the user switch off our site to look at something else? When do they come back?

  • By
    Create Namespaced Classes with MooTools

    MooTools has always gotten a bit of grief for not inherently using and standardizing namespaced-based JavaScript classes like the Dojo Toolkit does.  Many developers create their classes as globals which is generally frowned up.  I mostly disagree with that stance, but each to their own.  In any event...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    CSS :target

    One interesting CSS pseudo selector is :target.  The target pseudo selector provides styling capabilities for an element whose ID matches the window location's hash.  Let's have a quick look at how the CSS target pseudo selector works! The HTML Assume there are any number of HTML elements with...

  • By
    Fix Anchor URLs Using MooTools 1.2

    The administrative control panel I build for my customers features FCKEditor, a powerful WYSIWYG editor that allows the customer to add links, bold text, create ordered lists, and so on. I provide training and documentation to the customers but many times they simply forget to...

Discussion

  1. Lev Nar

    this is the best answer that I found with my problem, but the only question i have is how to do this is curl php

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!