HEAD Object

Description

The HEAD operation is used to retrieve information about a specific object or object size, without actually fetching the object itself. This is useful if you're only interested in the object metadata, and don't want to waste bandwidth on the object data. A HEAD request has the same options as a GET operation on an object. The response is identical to the GET response, except that there is no response body. For more information, see GET Object.

Requests

Syntax

HEAD /destinationObject HTTP/1.1
Host: destinationBucket.s3.amazonaws.com
Authorization: signature
Date: date

Headers

This operation uses standard request headers.

Responses

Success Response

Syntax

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
x-amz-id-2: id
x-amz-request-id: request_id
Date: date
Last-Modified: date
ETag: "etag"
Content-Type: type
Content-Length: length
Connection: close
Server: AmazonS3

Elements

Name Description

Name	Description
`Etag`	Returns the Etag of the new object. Type: String Ancestor: None
`Content-Length`	Returns the size of the object. Type: String Ancestor: None
`Content-Type`	Returns the object type. Type: String Ancestor: None

Etag

Returns the Etag of the new object.

Type: String

Ancestor: None

Content-Length

Returns the size of the object.

Type: String

Ancestor: None

Content-Type

Returns the object type.

Type: String

Ancestor: None

If the copy was not successful, you receive an error XML document.

Special Errors

There are no special errors for this operation. For information about general Amazon S3 errors, see List of Error Codes.

Examples

This example retrieves metadata for the Nelson object from the quotes bucket.

Sample Request

HEAD /Nelson HTTP/1.0
Host: quotes.s3.amazonaws.com
Date: Wed, 01 Mar  2006 12:00:00 GMT
Authorization: AWS 15B4D3461F177624206A:xQE0diMbLRepdf3YB+FIEXAMPLE=

Sample Response

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
x-amz-id-2: KZ7XUBI18rqFH91yZmYpWSRPg0/aeqwJXVzNgnk9Pa9GcHUuN2cxfsKk7V3NSUKg
x-amz-request-id: F7B5DF3AB381F03F
Date: Wed, 01 Mar  2006 12:00:00 GMT
x-amz-meta-family: Muntz
Last-Modified: Sun, 1 Jan 2006 12:00:00 GMT
ETag: "828ef3fdfa96f00ad9f27c383fc9ac7f"
Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Length: 5
Connection: close
Server: AmazonS3

Related Resources

Operations on Objects