Workaround for blocked URL shortening services?

I come across URLs from bit.ly, tinyurl, is.gd, etc. all the time. Unfortunately, these services are blocked by my employer. Is there a tool that unravels these URLs on my machine via some other service so I can get around the block?

I came across a bookmarklet to do this for TinyURLs once, but it'd be nice for something more comprehensive.

2 Answers

Two ways:

• LongURL
• using a proxy server (if you have access to a Linux/BSD system that's always on)

If you can run a shell, grep, and curl, you could expand them at the command line and copy the url manually with an alias like:

expandurl() { curl -sIL "$1" | grep -i '^Location: ' }

(The curl arguments mean: silent, only download the html headers, and follow redirects until they stop redirecting.)