Comments on: Use wget(1) To Expand Shortened URLs

By: Use wget(1) To Expand Shortened URLs

Use wget(1) To Expand Shortened URLs — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 18:47:42 +0000

[...] via pthree.org [...]

By: Lauri Ranta

Lauri Ranta — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 09:36:18 +0000

`curl -s -o /dev/null --head -w "%{url_effective}\n" -L "https://t.co/6e7LFNBv"`

- `--head` or `-I` only downloads HTTP headers
- `-w` or `--write-out` prints the specified string after the output
- `L` or `--location` follows location headers

By: Aaron Toponce

Aaron Toponce — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 02:37:46 +0000

@fRIOUX Schmidt- I only use ZSH, and it works fine from here. What is proto.h and Alarm.cpp? I would probably start from there.

By: fRIOUX Schmidt

fRIOUX Schmidt — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 23:41:05 +0000

For some reason this doesn’t seem to work on zsh; when I run the final updated version here is my output:

helena [14105] ~/code/WLS «master¹» $ expandurl http://t.co/LDWqmtDM
proto.h:/* Alarm.cpp */
proto.h:/* Alarm.cpp */

Any ideas?

By: Weboide

Weboide — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 13:26:47 +0000

This works the best for me. It does not create any file.
expandurl() { wget –spider -S $1 2>&1 | grep ^Location; }

By: toobuntu

toobuntu — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 04:45:19 +0000

Well, this will return the expanded URI only:
curl -sIL http://t.co/LDWqmtDM | grep ‘^Location’ | tail -n 1 | awk ‘{print $2}’

By: Seth

Seth — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 22:50:12 +0000

No discussion about something in wget is complete without the curl version:

curl -sIL http://t.co/LDWqmtDM | grep ‘^Location’

By: M

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 22:46:00 +0000

Thanks, for the post and comments.

By: Dexter

Dexter — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 19:30:41 +0000

The –spider option causes wget to only make HEAD requests, so you don’t have to worry about it downloading the page. The -S just makes it include the headers in the output.

By: Aaron Toponce

Aaron Toponce — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 19:11:10 +0000

@Dexter- Awesome! I read about –spider in the manual, but it still downloads the page it lands on, which could be quite large (in the case of a PDF, for example). Instead, it appears that the ‘-S’ switch is superior.

By: Dexter

Dexter — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 17:47:20 +0000

expandurl() { wget –spider $1 2>&1 | grep ‘^Location’ }

By: Aaron Toponce

Aaron Toponce — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 16:34:21 +0000

@Me- That is loaded with awesome-sauce. Thanks for sharing! I was thinking about if something like that was possible on the way into work this morning. Glad to see it is.

By: Me

Me — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 16:30:33 +0000

In the expandurl() function, changing “–max-redirect=$2″ to “–max-redirect=${2:-0}” lets you skip specifying the second parameter whenever you want max-redirect set to 0.

By: Charles Profitt

Charles Profitt — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 14:53:32 +0000

Thanks for posting this… it certainly looks to be a much better way of trying to determine if I want to click on a shortened link. I never knew about the max redirect on wget so this has been a good lesson there as well.