Command-line web request client that outputs content and return non-zero exit status if error 404/etc

Question

I need a Linux command to launch an HTTP request, and:

• dump the HTTP response (content, not headers) on the terminal standard output
• return an command error status of 0 if the request went well (ended up with HTTP code 200 OK), and non-zero in all other cases (404, 500, connection failed, etc)

Gratis, needs to work on most Linux distributions, bonus for Mac.

curl does not seem to be able to do that, as its --fail switch prevents HTTP output.

Answer 1

This small bash wrapper does the trick:

#!/bin/bash
# Perform a web request, dump content, and exit with relevant exit code

# Take URL as command-line argument
URL=$1

# Launch HTTP request
HEADERS=`mktemp`
curl --dump-header $HEADERS $URL

# Read the first header (example: HTTP/1.1 200 OK)
HEADER=`head -n 1 $HEADERS`

# Remove temporary file
rm $HEADERS

# Return success if HTTP code OK, or failure for any other HTTP code
if [[ $HEADER == *" 200 "* ]]; then
  exit 0
else
  exit 1
fi

It requires curl and bash.

License: Public domain