How to check if an URL exists with the shell and probably curl?

Question

I am looking for a simple shell (+curl) check that would evaluate as true or false if an URL exists (returns 200) or not.

Answer 1

I find wget to be a better tool for this than CURL; there's fewer options to remember and you can actually check for its truth value in bash to see if it succeeded or not by default.

if wget --spider http://google.com 2>/dev/null; then
  echo "File exists"
else
  echo "File does not exist"
fi

The --spider option makes wget just check for the file instead of downloading it, and 2> /dev/null silences wget's stderr output.