Use Bash Script to Test HTTP Status Code

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**Disclaimer

The intended audience for this blog are professionals who are in a beginner/intermediate phase of their career and are interested to explore the treasure trove i.e. the world of scripting and coding. Although the below technique may seem a pretty simple one, this plays a pivotal role while working on Website Security Audit or big Bug Bounty Projects. In some of my future posts, I will be discussing specific use cases and investigation scenarios, where I have benefited a lot from using this or similar bash scripts.

As a security consultant, having worked with multiple clients from different business verticals and nations, I have often felt the need to have an inventory of automated tools that will reduce the mean time for basic analysis/checks while one is on a hunting spree on the internet. With that in mind and a little bit of testing & research, I ended up with a bash script of 17 lines, that helps in checking the HTTP status codes from a dictionary of domains.

My Lab setup:

  • Commands are executed in Mac OS X however these bash commands will work on any Linux variant.
  • Name of the dictionary of domain lists – test_domains.txt
  • Name of the script – website_status_checker.sh

Bash Script website_status_checker.sh

Domain List test_domains.txt

Scenario

The script website_status_checker.sh will read through the dictionary list of domains test_domains.txt and report the HTTP status code for the websites.

Popular HTTP status codes are:

  • 200 – OK
  • 301 – Moved Permanently
  • 302 – Redirected
  • 000 – Not Responding / Timeout

Output

From the output, we can see that while our bash script was able to access the first 3 websites in our list, both using HTTP and HTTPS protocols, the last website checklist[.]onlineflora[.]cn was not accessible. As a result, while the first 3 websites returned HTTP 200 response, the last one returned a “not responding” status.

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Github – Where do we fork!

Here is the link to Ethical Securities’ github repository which contains some of the basic code snippets you may find useful.

How was that?