Hello, Probably I am just too lazy, haven't spent enough time to read the man, and wget can actually do exactly what I want. If so -- I do apologize for taking your time. Otherwise: THANKS for your time!..:-).
My problem is: redirects. I am trying to catch them by using, say, netcat ... or writing some simple pieces of software -- sending HTTP GET and catching the "Location:" in response. What I've found out is that (obviously) wget is wa-aaaaaaaaay more sophisticated and can do much better job, especially in certain cases. I started using it by basically catching stderr from wget [params my_urls] and then parsing it -- looking for the "^Location: " pattern. Works great. The downside is: performance. You see, I don't need the actual content, -- only the canonical URL. But wget just wgets it - no matter what. As long as (from my perspective) this is a case of "If Wget does not behave as documented, it's a bug." -- according to man, -- I am taking a liberty to 'file a bug'. (The "expected" behavior I'm talking about is this: if I use "--spider", I expect wget do nothing after finding the server -- like sending GET to the server and getting HTML back). That's my bug - and/or a feature I'd really like to have. An alternative would be: adding --some_flag=n, meaning "receive no more than n lines of html"). Do you think that this could be a useful feature that other people would probably love too?... Thanks for your time and for a great tool, Vlad.