Question

I want to print just the HTTP status code for a web page retrieved using cURL. Is it possible to do this with an AWK one-liner?

Answer 1

Solution

The following one-liner will read the HTTP header from a pipe, and print out the status code.

awk 'BEGIN {"curl -sI http://example.com" | getline; print "Status Code: " $2}'

Interesting Aspects

There are a few nice things about this approach that may not be obvious at first glance. For example:

• This solution is pure AWK; no shell script or wrapper required.
• Since we only care about the first line of the header, we don’t need to track or compare NR to skip undesirable lines.
• $0 is populated in a BEGIN block, so AWK doesn’t need a file argument.