How to check a website header using Linux command line

The easiest tool to check for a website’s headers su curl In the below example we will check a headers of google.com:

$ curl -I google.com
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Location: http://www.google.com.au/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=9Mb0VKXbHNLu8weZ24Bo
Content-Length: 260
Date: Mon, 02 Mar 2015 20:24:20 GMT
Server: GFE/2.0
Alternate-Protocol: 80:quic,p=0.08

If you wish to download a website content and also include a header then use:

$ curl -i google.com

Another option to check for a website header is by using lynx command:

$ lynx -head -dump http://google.com
HTTP/1.0 302 Found
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Location: http://www.google.com.au/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=rcj0VMLXJcXu8wfvoIGwBw
Content-Length: 262
Date: Mon, 02 Mar 2015 20:31:41 GMT
Server: GFE/2.0
Alternate-Protocol: 80:quic,p=0.08

And of course wget can also extract a website’s header with a use of --server-response option. For example:

$ wget -q --server-response http://google.com
  HTTP/1.1 302 Found
  Cache-Control: private
  Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
  Location: http://www.google.com.au/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=Isr0VJCHNsvu8weFwoG4Bw
  Content-Length: 262
  Date: Mon, 02 Mar 2015 20:37:54 GMT
  Server: GFE/2.0
  Alternate-Protocol: 80:quic,p=0.08
  HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  Date: Mon, 02 Mar 2015 20:37:55 GMT
  Expires: -1
  Cache-Control: private, max-age=0
  Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
  Set-Cookie: PREF=ID=97c97a203aeb6610:FF=0:TM=1425328675:LM=1425328675:S=eXgtzGUbv53_2_TC; expires=Wed, 01-Mar-2017 20:37:55 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.com.au
  Set-Cookie: NID=67=hW7zo2M6vOcFnwq4vvUloeE8NxM5n6L_jbJocYSA0yirrh4QTviVmvqcLOW2WM4KjJGLi01xIa9O0PrhWaPqKBtP_hz1wINF2nW7trMfR0T2aXyEDoNuDNeUUXAAjIhB; expires=Tue, 01-Sep-2015 20:37:55 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.com.au; HttpOnly
  P3P: CP="This is not a P3P policy! See http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=151657 for more info."
  Server: gws
  X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
  X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
  Alternate-Protocol: 80:quic,p=0.08
  Accept-Ranges: none
  Vary: Accept-Encoding
  Transfer-Encoding: chunked