Can I use wget to check , but not download

Question

Can I use wget to check for a 404 and not actually download the resource? If so how? Thanks

Answer 1

If you want to check quietly via $? without the hassle of grep'ing wget's output you can use:

wget -q "http://blah.meh.com/my/path" -O /dev/null

Works even on URLs with just a path but has the disadvantage that something's really downloaded so this is not recommended when checking big files for existence.