The UNIX command line tools is something that just keeps giving. Within web development I often find myself wanting to quickly debug a URL, see whether it’s alive or what the response is. Often I do not want to download the whole content (a large file for example). Before I learned the following, I would use Chromes Developer Tools. That is until I learned how to do it more efficiently and quicker with good old curl:

curl -I https://klevo.sk

Which returns something like:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: cloudflare-nginx
Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2015 17:27:17 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Connection: keep-alive

It’s especially handy when setting up and testing temporary or permanent HTTP redirects. Doing that in a browser can be cumbersome due to caching.