wget --spider

[Ercolino de Spiacico]

Thanks Nicholas

I sort of got to the same conclusion that -S is somehow referring to 
--spider or a sort of alias to it.

There is one thing that puzzles me though, the -S will show the Server 
response indeed but also download the file. This latter action defeats 
the concept for my purpose (check RAM availability prior to download to 
prevent starvation).

Say you're in my situation, with embedded-system's RAM overloaded you 
need to make a decision if a file download will fit or not, -S will 
provide the info but potentially already creating the damage.

Is there any way to get the file size only without downloading first?

I've tried appending "-O /dev/null", somehow it seems to work (file not 
created) but I'm not sure this is the right approach... Not triggering 
the file download at all would be the optimal result I suppose.