BASH If command contains 'this text' do another command? - bash

Question

I'm creating a bash script to check the HTTP headers on remote hosts, I'm doing this via cURL and have noted that appending http://{host} will only work for services running on tcp\80, and not tcp\443. For example for HTTPS services, you require curl -I -k {host}, as opposed to HTTP services which only required curl -I {host}. This is my script:
for host in $(cat file.txt); do
echo " "
echo "Current host: "${host}
curl -I -k https://${host}
echo " "
echo "=============================================="
done
Now what I'm wanting is some condition operator to check that if the output is "Could not resolve host" then the script should run "curl -I http://{host}" on those hosts which the stdout contained the str value "Could not resolve host".
How can I achieve this in bash?

Answer 1

stdout will not contain Could not resolve host though, that's output to stderr. While you could capture stderr and then do string matching, there is a much, much simpler solution: exit code.
You can see here that curl will always exit with code 6 when it fails to resolve host. Thus, simply testing the exit code is sufficient:
curl -i -k http://nowaythisthingexists.test
if [[ $? -eq 6 ]]
then
echo "oopsie, couldn't resolve host!"
fi
Alternately, if you really want to do it by matching strings, make sure to redirect stderr to stdout (and possibly also kill stdout so it doesn't interfere):
output=$(curl -i -k http://nowaythisthingexists.test 2>&1 >/dev/null)
if [[ "$output" = *"Could not resolve host"* ]]
then
echo "oopsie, couldn't resolve host!"
fi
Obviously, you are not getting the output of your request this way, so you'd need to redirect it somewhere more useful than /dev/null — a file, or a Unix pipe. Now it's getting more complicated than it needs to be.