Question

I need to determine if a remote file exists or not.

I have used curl, but it propably reads whole file because it’s very slow.

Is there any fast method to “touch” a remote file (for example read only one byte of that file or return false when a 404 occurs)?

Also there could be a problem if tested domain does not exist or connection simply times out. So there has to be timeout interval set to lower than the usual value.

Answer 1

When you just want to check the existance of the file, you can use curl to make a HEAD Request instead of a GET. This way the webserver will only answer with the header information (including the 200/404/… status code) and not the entire file