[bash] 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"

wget -S -i *file* will get you the headers from each url in a file.

Filter though grep for the status code specifically.

wget --spider -S "http://url/to/be/checked" 2>&1 | grep "HTTP/" | awk '{print $2}'

prints only the status code for you

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

I found a tool "webchk” written in Python. Returns a status code for a list of urls. https://pypi.org/project/webchk/

Output looks like this:

? 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)

Hope that helps!

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 '%{url_effective}: %{http_code}\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.

This relies on widely available wget, present almost everywhere, even on Alpine Linux.

wget --server-response --spider --quiet "${url}" 2>&1 | awk 'NR==1{print $2}'

The explanations are as follow :

--quiet

Turn off Wget's output.

Source - wget man pages

--spider

[ ... ] it will not download the pages, just check that they are there. [ ... ]

Source - wget man pages

--server-response

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 :

• the second ($2) non-blank group of characters: {$2}
• on the very first line of the header: NR==1

And because we want to print it... {print $2}.

wget --server-response --spider --quiet "${url}" 2>&1 | awk 'NR==1{print $2}'

Extending the answer already provided by Phil. Adding parallelism to it is a no brainer in bash if you use xargs for the call.

Here the code:

xargs -n1 -P 10 curl -o /dev/null --silent --head --write-out '%{url_effective}: %{http_code}\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 '%{url_effective};%{http_code};%{time_total};%{time_namelookup};%{time_connect};%{size_download};%{speed_download}\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.