[wget] Can I use wget to check , but not download

Can I use wget to check for a 404 and not actually download the resource? If so how? Thanks

If you are in a directory where only root have access to write in system. Then you can directly use wget www.example.com/wget-test using a standard user account. So it will hit the url but because of having no write permission file won't be saved.. This method is working fine for me as i am using this method for a cronjob. Thanks.

sthx

You can use the following option to check for the files:

wget --delete-after URL

Yes easy.

wget --spider www.bluespark.co.nz

That will give you

Resolving www.bluespark.co.nz... 210.48.79.121
Connecting to www.bluespark.co.nz[210.48.79.121]:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: unspecified [text/html]
200 OK

There is the command line parameter --spider exactly for this. In this mode, wget does not download the files and its return value is zero if the resource was found and non-zero if it was not found. Try this (in your favorite shell):

wget -q --spider address
echo $?

Or if you want full output, leave the -q off, so just wget --spider address. -nv shows some output, but not as much as the default.

If you want to check quietly via $? without the hassle of grep'ing wget's output you can use:

wget -q "http://blah.meh.com/my/path" -O /dev/null

Works even on URLs with just a path but has the disadvantage that something's really downloaded so this is not recommended when checking big files for existence.