How to get remote file size from a shell script?

Question

Is there a way to get the size of a remote file like

http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/public_timeline.json

in shell script?

Answer 1

I use like this ([Cc]ontent-[Ll]ength:), because I got server give multiple Content-Length character at header response

curl -sI "http://someserver.com/hls/125454.ts" | grep [Cc]ontent-[Ll]ength: | awk '{ print $2 }'

Accept-Ranges: bytes Access-Control-Expose-Headers: Date, Server, Content-Type, Content-Length Server: WowzaStreamingEngine/4.5.0 Cache-Control: no-cache Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true Access-Control-Allow-Methods: OPTIONS, GET, POST, HEAD Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Content-Type, User-Agent, If-Modified-Since, Cache-Control, Range Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2017 01:56:08 GMT Content-Type: video/MP2T Content-Length: 666460

Answer 2

Two caveats to the other answers:

1. Some servers don't return the correct Content-Length for a HEAD request, so you might need to do the full download.
2. You'll likely get an unrealistically large response (compared to a modern browser) unless you specify gzip/deflate headers.

Also, you can do this without grep/awk or piping:

curl 'http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/public_timeline.json' --silent --write-out 'size_download=%{size_download}\n' --output /dev/null

And the same request with compression:

curl 'http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/public_timeline.json' --silent  -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate' --write-out 'size_download=%{size_download}\n' --output /dev/null

Answer 3

Similar to codaddict's answer, but without the call to grep:

curl -sI http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/public_timeline.json | awk '/Content-Length/ { print $2 }'

Answer 4

different solution:

ssh userName@IP ls -s PATH | grep FILENAME | awk '{print$1}'

gives you the size in KB

Answer 5

The accepted solution was not working for me, this is:

curl -s https://code.jquery.com/jquery-3.1.1.min.js | wc -c

Answer 6

To combine all the above for me works:

URL="http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/i386/iso-dvd/debian-9.5.0-i386-DVD-1.iso"
curl --head --silent --location "$URL" | grep -i "content-length:" | tr -d " \t" | cut -d ':' -f 2

This will return just the content length in bytes:

3767500800