Get final URL after curl is redirected

Thanks, that helped me. I made some improvements and wrapped that in a helper script "finalurl":

#!/bin/bash
curl $1 -s -L -I -o /dev/null -w '%{url_effective}'
  • -o output to /dev/null
  • -I don't actually download, just discover the final URL
  • -s silent mode, no progressbars

This made it possible to call the command from other scripts like this:

echo `finalurl http://someurl/`

as another option:

$ curl -i http://google.com
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Location: http://www.google.com/
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Date: Sat, 19 Jun 2010 04:15:10 GMT
Expires: Mon, 19 Jul 2010 04:15:10 GMT
Cache-Control: public, max-age=2592000
Server: gws
Content-Length: 219
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block

<HTML><HEAD><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8">
<TITLE>301 Moved</TITLE></HEAD><BODY>
<H1>301 Moved</H1>
The document has moved
<A HREF="http://www.google.com/">here</A>.
</BODY></HTML>

But it doesn't go past the first one.


curl's -w option and the sub variable url_effective is what you are looking for.

Something like

curl -Ls -o /dev/null -w %{url_effective} http://google.com

More info

-L         Follow redirects
-s         Silent mode. Don't output anything
-o FILE    Write output to <file> instead of stdout
-w FORMAT  What to output after completion

More

You might want to add -I (that is an uppercase i) as well, which will make the command not download any "body", but it then also uses the HEAD method, which is not what the question included and risk changing what the server does. Sometimes servers don't respond well to HEAD even when they respond fine to GET.