Script to get the HTTP status code of a list of urls?
I have a list of URLS that I need to check, to see if they still work or not. I would like to write a bash script that does that for me. I only need the returned HTTP status code, i.e. 200, 404, 500 and so forth. Nothing more. EDIT Note that there is an issue if the page says «404 not found» but returns a 200 OK message. It’s a misconfigured web server, but you may have to consider this case. For more on this, see Check if a URL goes to a page containing the text «404»
To be fair, my script’s «bug» is only when the server returns HTTP code 200 but the body text says «404 not found», which is a misbehaving webserver.
The exit status of wget will be 0 if the response code was 200, 8 if 404, 4 if 302. You can use the $? variable to access the exit status of the previous command.
9 Answers 9
Curl has a specific option, —write-out , for this:
$ curl -o /dev/null --silent --head --write-out '%\n' 200 - -o /dev/null throws away the usual output
- —silent throws away the progress meter
- —head makes a HEAD HTTP request, instead of GET
- —write-out ‘%\n’ prints the required status code
To wrap this up in a complete Bash script:
#!/bin/bash while read LINE; do curl -o /dev/null --silent --head --write-out "% $LINE\n" "$LINE" done < url-list.txt (Eagle-eyed readers will notice that this uses one curl process per URL, which imposes fork and TCP connection penalties. It would be faster if multiple URLs were combined in a single curl, but there isn't space to write out the monsterous repetition of options that curl requires to do this.)
@Manu: Yes, I've edited my answer to show one possible way of wrapping up the curl command. It assumes url-list.txt contains one URL per line.
I don't know why script from above andswer always get me 000 in the output, but when I run command only once without loop it works.
@KarolFiturski I had the same problem (which you've probably since fixed but just in case anyone else stumbles across this. ) in my case I had carriage returns at the line ends of my input file, causing the urls to be like http://example.com/\r when going through the loop
I had this issue and I was able to fix it by switching the line ending from the Windows type to the Linux type.
wget --spider -S "http://url/to/be/checked" 2>&1 | grep "HTTP/" | awk '' prints only the status code for you
you can use --max-redirect=0 if you do not want multiple codes: wget --max-redirect=0 --spider -S "https://miles4migrants.org/ukraine2canada/s" 2>&1 | grep "HTTP/" | awk '
Extending the answer already provided by Phil. Adding parallelism to it is a no brainer in bash if you use xargs for the call.
xargs -n1 -P 10 curl -o /dev/null --silent --head --write-out '%: %\n' < url.lst -n1: use just one value (from the list) as argument to the curl call
-P10: Keep 10 curl processes alive at any time (i.e. 10 parallel connections)
Check the write_out parameter in the manual of curl for more data you can extract using it (times, etc).
In case it helps someone this is the call I'm currently using:
xargs -n1 -P 10 curl -o /dev/null --silent --head --write-out '%;%;%;%;%;%;%\n' < url.lst | tee results.csv It just outputs a bunch of data into a csv file that can be imported into any office tool.
This is awesome, just what I was looking for, thank you sir. One question, how could one include the page title of the page in the csv results?
@estani - stackoverflow.com/users/1182464/estani how could one include getting the page title of a page into the .csv file. Sorry for repost, forgot to tag you so you would get notified about this question. Many thanks.
@MitchellK this is not handling the contents of the http call at all. If the "page title" (whatever that is) is in the url, then you could add it. If not, you need to parse the whole page to extract the "title" of it (assuming you mean a html page retrieved by the http). Look for other answers at stack overflow or ask that specific question.
This relies on widely available wget , present almost everywhere, even on Alpine Linux.
wget --server-response --spider --quiet "$" 2>&1 | awk 'NR==1' The explanations are as follow :
Turn off Wget's output.
Source - wget man pages
[ . ] it will not download the pages, just check that they are there. [ . ]
Source - wget man pages
Print the headers sent by HTTP servers and responses sent by FTP servers.
Source - wget man pages
What they don't say about --server-response is that those headers output are printed to standard error (sterr), thus the need to redirect to stdin.
The output sent to standard input, we can pipe it to awk to extract the HTTP status code. That code is :
And because we want to print it. .
wget --server-response --spider --quiet "$" 2>&1 | awk 'NR==1' Use curl to fetch the HTTP-header only (not the whole file) and parse it:
$ curl -I --stderr /dev/null http://www.google.co.uk/index.html | head -1 | cut -d' ' -f2 200 The -I flag causes curl to make a HTTP HEAD request, which is treated separately from a normal HTTP GET by some servers and can thus return different values. The command should still work without it.
wget -S -i *file* will get you the headers from each url in a file.
Filter though grep for the status code specifically.
I found a tool "webchk” written in Python. Returns a status code for a list of urls. https://pypi.org/project/webchk/
▶ webchk -i ./dxieu.txt | grep '200' http://salesforce-case-status.dxi.eu/login . 200 OK (0.108) https://support.dxi.eu/hc/en-gb . 200 OK (0.389) https://support.dxi.eu/hc/en-gb . 200 OK (0.401) Keeping in mind that curl is not always available (particularly in containers), there are issues with this solution:
wget --server-response --spider --quiet "$" 2>&1 | awk 'NR==1' which will return exit status of 0 even if the URL doesn't exist.
Alternatively, here is a reasonable container health-check for using wget:
wget -S --spider -q -t 1 "$" 2>&1 | grep "200 OK" > /dev/null While it may not give you exact status out, it will at least give you a valid exit code based health responses (even with redirects on the endpoint).
Due to https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls#Non-atomic_writes_with_xargs_-P (output from parallel jobs in xargs risks being mixed), I would use GNU Parallel instead of xargs to parallelize:
cat url.lst | parallel -P0 -q curl -o /dev/null --silent --head --write-out '%: %\n' > outfile In this particular case it may be safe to use xargs because the output is so short, so the problem with using xargs is rather that if someone later changes the code to do something bigger, it will no longer be safe. Or if someone reads this question and thinks he can replace curl with something else, then that may also not be safe.
https://fsfe.org https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2010/fall/gnu-parallel-a-design-for-life https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/who-actually-reads-the-code https://publiccode.eu/ How to evaluate http response codes from bash/shell script?
I have the feeling that I'm missing the obvious, but have not succeeded with man [curl|wget] or google ("http" makes such a bad search term). I'm looking for a quick&dirty fix to one of our webservers that frequently fails, returning status code 500 with an error message. Once this happens, it needs to be restarted. As the root cause seems to be hard to find, we're aiming for a quick fix, hoping that it will be enough to bridge the time until we can really fix it (the service doesn't need high availability) The proposed solution is to create a cron job that runs every 5 minutes, checking http://localhost:8080/. If this returns with status code 500, the webserver will be restarted. The server will restart in under a minute, so there's no need to check for restarts already running. The server in question is a ubuntu 8.04 minimal installation with just enough packages installed to run what it currently needs. There is no hard requirement to do the task in bash, but I'd like it to run in such a minimal environment without installing any more interpreters. (I'm sufficiently familiar with scripting that the command/options to assign the http status code to an environment variable would be enough - this is what I've looked for and could not find.)
13 Answers 13
I haven't tested this on a 500 code, but it works on others like 200, 302 and 404.
response=$(curl --write-out '%' --silent --output /dev/null servername) Note, format provided for --write-out should be quoted. As suggested by @ibai, add --head to make a HEAD only request. This will save time when the retrieval is successful since the page contents won't be transmitted.