How to test an HTTP 301 redirect?

Posted by NoozNooz42 on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by NoozNooz42
Published on 2010-06-14T12:57:09Z Indexed on 2010/06/14 13:02 UTC
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http

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http-status-code-301

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telnet

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http-status-codes

How can one easily test HTTP return codes, like, say, a 301 redirect?

For example, if I want to "see what's going on", I can use telnet to do something like this:

... $ telnet nytimes.com 80

Trying 199.239.136.200...
Connected to nytimes.com.
Escape character is '^]'.

GET / HTTP/1.0

(enter)

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Sun-ONE-Web-Server/6.1
Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2010 12:18:04 GMT
Content-type: text/html
Set-cookie: RMID=007af83f42dd4c161dfcce7d; expires=Tuesday, 14-Jun-2011 12:18:04 GMT; path=/; domain=.nytimes.com
Set-cookie: adxcs=-; path=/; domain=.nytimes.com
Set-cookie: adxcs=-; path=/; domain=.nytimes.com
Set-cookie: adxcs=-; path=/; domain=.nytimes.com
Expires: Thu, 01 Dec 1994 16:00:00 GMT
Cache-control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
Connection: close

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>    
<head>      
...

Which is an easy way to access quite some infos.

But now I want to test that a 301 redirect is indeed a 301 redirect.

How can I do so?

Basically, instead of getting a HTTP/1.1 200 OK I'd like to know how I can get the 301?

I know that I can enter the name of the URL in a browser and "see" that I'm redirected, but I'd like to know what tool(s) can be used to actually really "see" the 301 redirect.

Btw, I did test with a telnet, but when I enter www.example.org, which I redirected to example.org (without the www), all I can see is an "200 OK", I don't get to see the 301.

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