Today I Learned

Sometimes you need to follow an url trough multiple redirects. I've created a simple script you can alias into your .bashrc or .zshrc file and then just use it as a regular shell command:

Add this line to .zshrc or .bashrc

# Follow URL
alias checkurl='_checkurl() { curl -v -L $1 2>&1 | egrep "^(> Host:|> GET|> Code|< HTTP|\* SSL)"}; _checkurl'

Then you can use it like so:

checkurl google.com

it will output this:

> GET / HTTP/1.1
> Host: google.com
< HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> Host: www.google.com
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Really useful when debugging URLs.