Getting only response header from HTTP POST using cURL - post

Question

One can request only the headers using HTTP HEAD, as option -I in curl(1).
$ curl -I /
Lengthy HTML response bodies are a pain to get in command-line, so I'd like to get only the header as feedback for my POST requests. However, HEAD and POST are two different methods.
How do I get cURL to display only response headers to a POST request?

Answer 1

-D, --dump-header <file>
Write the protocol headers to the specified file.
This option is handy to use when you want to store the headers
that a HTTP site sends to you. Cookies from the headers could
then be read in a second curl invocation by using the -b,
--cookie option! The -c, --cookie-jar option is however a better
way to store cookies.
and
-S, --show-error
When used with -s, --silent, it makes curl show an error message if it fails.
from the man page. so
curl -sS -D - www.acooke.org -o /dev/null
follows redirects, dumps the headers to stdout and sends the data to /dev/null (that's a GET, not a POST, but you can do the same thing with a POST - just add whatever option you're already using for POSTing data)
note the - after the -D which indicates that the output "file" is stdout.

Answer 2

The other answers require the response body to be downloaded. But there's a way to make a POST request that will only fetch the header:
curl -s -I -X POST http://www.google.com
An -I by itself performs a HEAD request which can be overridden by -X POST to perform a POST (or any other) request and still only get the header data.

Answer 3

The Following command displays extra informations
curl -X POST http://httpbin.org/post -v > /dev/null
You can ask server to send just HEAD, instead of full response
curl -X HEAD -I http://httpbin.org/
Note: In some cases, server may send different headers for POST and HEAD. But in almost all cases headers are same.

Answer 4

For long response bodies (and various other similar situations), the solution I use is always to pipe to less, so
curl -i https://api.github.com/users | less
or
curl -s -D - https://api.github.com/users | less
will do the job.

Answer 5

Maybe it is little bit of an extreme, but I am using this super short version:
curl -svo. <URL>
Explanation:
-v print debug information (which does include headers)
-o. send web page data (which we want to ignore) to a certain file, . in this case, which is a directory and is an invalid destination and makes the output to be ignored.
-s no progress bar, no error information (otherwise you would see Warning: Failed to create the file .: Is a directory)
warning: result always fails (in terms of error code, if reachable or not). Do not use in, say, conditional statements in shell scripting...

Answer 6

Much easier – this also follows links.
curl -IL http://example.com/in-the-shadows

Answer 7

While the other answers have not worked for me in all situations, the best solution I could find (working with POST as well), taken from here:
curl -vs 'https://some-site.com' 1> /dev/null

Answer 8

headcurl.cmd (windows version)
curl -sSkv -o NUL %* 2>&1
I don't want a progress bar -s,
but I do want errors -S,
not bothering about valid https certificates -k,
getting high verbosity -v (this is about troubleshooting, is it?),
no output (in a clean way).
oh, and I want to forward stderr to stdout, so I can grep against the whole thing (since most or all output comes in stderr)
%* means [pass on all parameters to this script] (well(https://stackoverflow.com/a/980372/444255), well usually that's just one parameter: the url you are testing
real-world example (on troubleshooting proxy issues):
C:\depot>headcurl google.ch | grep -i -e http -e cache
Hostname was NOT found in DNS cache
GET HTTP://google.ch/ HTTP/1.1
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Location: http://www.google.ch/
Cache-Control: public, max-age=2592000
X-Cache: HIT from company.somewhere.ch
X-Cache-Lookup: HIT from company.somewhere.ch:1234
Linux version
for your .bash_aliases / .bash_rc:
alias headcurl='curl -sSkv -o /dev/null $# 2>&1'

Answer 9

-D, --dump-header
Write the protocol headers to the specified file.
This option is handy to use when you want to store the headers
that a HTTP site sends to you. Cookies from the headers could
then be read in a second curl invocation by using the -b,
--cookie option! The -c, --cookie-jar option is however a better
way to store cookies.