webhead

Description:

webhead requests only the header from a web server using the HEAD (request) method. Instead of returning the content of a page, it returns only the meta-content from that page. (An example of this is given below).

The value of this utility is:

• The ability to retrieve only the head response from a web server (useful for scripting/checking responses from the server without pulling the entire page).
• Sample socket code for RFC2616.
• Scripted HEAD requests for monitoring purposes can be easily removed from site statistics so that the site stats will not be skewed by monitoring tools.

Here is a sample run against this web site:

$ ./webhead www.tablespace.net/webhead/index.html
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 22 May 2006 15:17:38 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.46 (Red Hat)
Last-Modified: Sun, 18 Dec 2005 01:45:33 GMT
ETag: "126c0d8-66b-97108940"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 1643
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

The Distribution:

The distribution is C source.

Latest:

   webhead-0_6_0.tar.gz

This code is released under the GNU license.

Application Notes:

• Compiled and written for Linux. While it has not been specifically ported to other Unicies, doing so should be a trivial issue.