Checking HTTP Headers With the Lynx Browser

You can check your HTTP headers quickly with Lynx. If you are using Linux, set a keyboard shortcut to open up a terminal. On Ubuntu (or probably any GNOME-based distro), just go to System —> Preferences —> Keyboard Shortcuts. You can then set a keyboard shortcut. I set the keyboard shortcut for opening a terminal to Ctrl-Alt-Shift-t.

Once you have a keyboard shortcut set up for opening a terminal, using tools like Lynx become very fast. When you want to check HTTP headers, just use your keyboard shortcut to open a terminal, and then follow the directions below. I'm not sure if there is a keyboard shortcut to open a terminal on Mac OS X or Windows, but the techniques below will still work.

Then type the following line in the terminal, replacing example.com with the domain name that you want to check:

lynx -head -dump "http://www.example.com"

The headers will then be output in the terminal. To save the headers to a file, just use:

lynx -head -dump "http://www.example.com" >MyFile.txt

To output all of the source code of a page in addition to the headers, use this:

lynx -mime_header -dump "http://www.example.com"

Other easy ways to check the HTTP headers

You can check HTTP headers with the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar Extension as well as the LiveHTTPheaders extension. There is also a web site that will check the request and response headers for you here.