wget HEAD request?

Question

I'd like to send HTTP HEAD request using wget, is it possible?

Answer 1

It's not wget, but you can do that quite easily by using curl.

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

Produces this output:

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently                        
Content-Length: 144                       
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8     
Location: http://superuser.com/
Date: Sat, 09 Oct 2010 19:11:50 GMT

Answer 2

Try:

wget -S --spider www.example.com

You can also pass -O /dev/null to prevent wget from writing HTTP response to a file.

Answer 3

Though not wget, many perl installs with lwp module will have a HEAD command installed.