curl usage to get header

Question

Why does this not work:

curl -X HEAD http://www.google.com

But these both work just fine:

curl -I http://www.google.com

curl -         


        

Answer 1

google.com is not responding to HTTP HEAD requests, which is why you are seeing a hang for the first command.

It does respond to GET requests, which is why the third command works.

As for the second, curl just prints the headers from a standard request.