Get final URL after curl is redirected

Question

I need to get the final URL after a page redirect preferably with curl or wget.

For example http://google.com may redirect to http://www.google.com

Answer 1

The parameters -L (--location) and -I (--head) still doing unnecessary HEAD-request to the location-url.

If you are sure that you will have no more than one redirect, it is better to disable follow location and use a curl-variable %{redirect_url}.

This code do only one HEAD-request to the specified URL and takes redirect_url from location-header:

curl --head --silent --write-out "%{redirect_url}\n" --output /dev/null "https://""goo.gl/QeJeQ4"

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Speed test

all_videos_link.txt - 50 links of goo.gl+bit.ly which redirect to youtube

1. With follow location

time while read -r line; do
    curl -kIsL -w "%{url_effective}\n" -o /dev/null  $line
done < all_videos_link.txt

Results:

real    1m40.832s
user    0m9.266s
sys     0m15.375s

2. Without follow location

time while read -r line; do
    curl -kIs -w "%{redirect_url}\n" -o /dev/null  $line
done < all_videos_link.txt

Results:

real    0m51.037s
user    0m5.297s
sys     0m8.094s