Any way to reverse-decode tinyurl link?

[Some Guy]

Tinyurl doesn't seem to offer a method for you to enter a tinyurl link
and get the URL that it maps to.

Is there a way to get the URL without actually entering the tinyurl into
a browser and crossing your fingers?

[JF Mezei]

Some Guy wrote:

> Is there a way to get the URL without actually entering the tinyurl into
> a browser and crossing your fingers?

I don't have a tinyurl handy, but I reckon using curl at the command
line should yield you some hint of the real URL.

You may have to either look at the header curl -I or the content (curl
without the -I).

One can cause a redirect within the header or within the contents with a
META tag. (or the clueless weenies who will use 2 megabytes of
javascript to do a redirect).

[Some Guy]

JF Mezei wrote:

> > Is there a way to get the URL without actually entering the
> > tinyurl into a browser and crossing your fingers?
>

> I reckon using curl at the command line should yield

No, that wouldn't work.

But this works:

http://preview.tinyurl.com/whatever

where whatever is the alpha-numeric sequence of the url you're trying to
decode.

For example, if whatever is 48b, then

TinyURL.com/48b

becomes

http://preview.tinyurl.com/48b

which decodes to

http://www.google.ca

[Ank]

~$ wget --spider http://TinyURL.com/48b
Spider mode enabled. Check if remote file exists.
--2009-03-07 18:16:36-- http://tinyurl.com/48b
Resolving tinyurl.com... 195.66.135.131, 195.66.135.138
Connecting to tinyurl.com|195.66.135.131|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Permanently
Location: http://www.google.ca [following]
Spider mode enabled. Check if remote file exists.
--2009-03-07 18:16:37-- http://www.google.ca/
Resolving www.google.ca... 72.14.205.147, 72.14.205.99, 72.14.205.104,

[...]

--spider
When invoked with this option, Wget will behave as a Web spider,
which means that it will not download the pages, just check that
they are there.
--
Ank