Print Only HTTP Status Code with wget

When working with web servers or troubleshooting HTTP requests, it can be handy to retrieve only the HTTP status code from a response. This can be helpful for testing the availability of an API endpoint or monitoring the health of a website. This tutorial explains how to print only HTTP status code with wget.

The wget command does not have a built-in option to print only the HTTP status code. To achieve this, we need to combine it with other commands, such as awk, to extract the code.

wget -S -qO /dev/null https://httpbin.org/get 2>&1 | awk '/HTTP\/[0-9.]+/{print $2}'

Explanation:

• -S - displays the server response headers, including the HTTP status line.
• -q - it stands for "quiet", allowing the command to run silently without showing download progress.
• -O /dev/null - redirects the downloaded content to /dev/null, ensuring the body of the response is not saved.
• 2>&1 - it redirects the stderr (where the headers are written) to stdout, allowing us to process all output in the next step.
• /HTTP\/[0-9.]+/ - matches lines containing the HTTP version (e.g., HTTP/1.1 or HTTP/2).
• {print $2} - extracts and prints the second field of the matching line, which is the HTTP status code (e.g., 200, 404).