CURL

curl is a command line tool for transferring files with URL syntax, supporting FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, SCP, SFTP, TFTP, TELNET, DICT, LDAP, LDAPS and FILE. curl supports SSL certificates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading, HTTP form based upload, proxies, cookies, user+password authentication (Basic, Digest, NTLM, Negotiate, kerberos...), file transfer resume, proxy tunneling and a busload of other useful tricks.

http://curl.haxx.se/

example:

$ curl -I http://game.baidu.com/
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Fri, 23 Nov 2007 14:32:39 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.36 (Unix) Resin/2.1.17
Cache-Control: private
Location: http://game.baidu.com/
Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=ds626cdKgMya; path=/
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=gbk