powershell curl and WebRequest both follow redirects

Question

I was trying to figure out the status code returned by my webpage, which most certainly is 301 (moved permanently), according to curl on the Linux subsystem, but using curl or t

Answer 1

It is because .NET and PowerShell are following redirects by default but curl does not do this. The default value of HttpWebRequest.AllowAutoRedirect is true and Invoke-WebRequest's MaximumRedirection default value is 5.

To turn off automatic redirection via WebRequest:

$request = [System.Net.WebRequest]::Create("http://google.com")
$request.AllowAutoRedirect = $false
$request.GetResponse()

or Invoke-WebRequest cmdlet:

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "http://google.com" -MaximumRedirection 0

Alternatively, use the -L flag to follow redirects in curl:

curl -L google.com