No life without CURLs

If you’re a web server administrator – as I am – every now and then, someone yells at you “The site is down, fix it!”.
A tool you should always keep handy is CURL. It’s a command-line web client (multi-platform – I use it on Win2K), that allows you to see the conversation between a web server and a client (like e.g. your browser).
Let’s say if you check out a page like this: curl -I http://someserver.com/whatever, you could get

For SSL/HTTPS problems, you better use curl -Ivk, because it gives you information on the server certificate.

Have CURL installed on all your machines, Linux or Windows. Actually, add unxutils.sourceforge.net to your Windows machine, so you can work with gawk and wget too.

CURL is not the same as a real browser (especially when working with cookies/sessions), but it can help you solve 90% of typical web server problems. If the problem is browser-related, and you want to see the actual conversation between your browser and the web server, use the Ethereal network protocol analyzer.

💬 windows