Viewing HTTP Headers using Wget

A web developer’s life becomes much saner if he/she has easy access to all page header information. Firefox offers you PLUGIN-NAME that helps you inspect headers.

Here is something for the terminally inclined ones among you - wget. To view the http headers give the following command in gnome terminal :

wget -S --spider www.example.com

where,
example.com is your domain,
--spider tells wget to act like spider and to just check the pages without actually downloading them,
-S gives the Server response.

Typical output of the wget command, when used as mentioned above, is as follows:

HTTP request sent, awaiting response...

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2012 07:58:38 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.63 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.0.63 OpenSSL/0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 PHP/5.2.9
Last-Modified: Mon, 12 Mar 2012 07:16:27 GMT
ETag: "d47b-854608c0"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 54395
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Expires: Sun, 19 Nov 1978 05:00:00 GMT
X-Header: Boost Citrus 1.8
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Length: 54395 (53K) [text/html]
Remote file exists and could contain further links,
but recursion is disabled -- not retrieving.