In my post about HTTP Status Codes and their usefulness for SEO I briefly mentioned a unix command you can run to retrieve the status code for any URL;
curl -I tosbourn.com
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
....
I wanted to talk about this in a bit more depth. I have recorded a video if you prefer watching SEO stuff to reading it.
The command we end up using is;
curl -Is tosbourn.com | head -1 | awk '{print $2}'
What this is saying is;
- Give me just the head information from the request (
curl -I) - Don’t give me feedback when retrieving the request (
curl -s) - I only care about the first row of whatever is returned (
head -1) - I only care about the second column of what is returned (
awk '{print $2}')