Health check of web page using curl

What about -sSf? From the man pages:

  -s/--silent
     Silent or quiet mode. Do not show progress meter or error messages.  
     Makes Curl mute.

  -S/--show-error
     When used with -s it makes curl show an error message if it fails.

  -f/--fail
     (HTTP)  Fail silently (no output at all) on server errors. This is mostly
     done to better enable scripts etc to better deal with failed attempts. In
     normal  cases  when a HTTP server fails to deliver a document, it returns
     an HTML document stating so (which often also describes  why  and  more).
     This flag will prevent curl from outputting that and return error 22.

     This method is not fail-safe and there are occasions where non-successful
     response codes will  slip  through,  especially  when  authentication  is
     involved (response codes 401 and 407).

For example:

curl -sSf http://example.org > /dev/null

I think that for the simplest way to check if the site is alive, you could use the following method:

curl -Is http://www.google.com | head -n 1

This will return HTTP/1.1 200 OK. If the return doesn't match your output then call out for help.

You need the -s flag (silent), -f flag (fail with exit code on error) and can use the -o flag to redirect output:

curl www.websiteToTest.com -s -f -o /dev/null || echo "Website down." | mail -s "Website is down" [email protected] 

This is just an bad example for a simple cron script. Normally, you want to get only one mail if a website is down.