How can I check if an S3 bucket name is available?

When wanting to create an S3 bucket, you don’t always want to go to the effort to actually attempt to make one.

Thankfully it’s possible to see if a name is taken without any special auth required.

$ curl -si https://blah.s3.amazonaws.com | grep bucket-region
x-amz-bucket-region: us-east-1
$ curl -si https://fesuihfseiu.s3.amazonaws.com | grep bucket-region
// no response so it's available

Here’s a full response to illustrate:

$ curl -si https://blah.s3.amazonaws.com
HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
x-amz-bucket-region: us-east-1
x-amz-request-id: QHNTTS080AYYG8H6
x-amz-id-2: 5HgWDKk7cDQ41J9zy6kKIdbMA57rtB4NaK/9zzceuNaHa2SSGMJFjHdLlba2j1TFsp35GLBPcvU=
Content-Type: application/xml
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Date: Mon, 01 Jan 2024 05:19:00 GMT
Server: AmazonS3

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Error><Code>AccessDenied</Code><Message>Access Denied</Message><RequestId>QHNTTS080AYYG8H6</RequestId><HostId>5HgWDKk7cDQ41J9zy6kKIdbMA57rtB4NaK/9zzceuNaHa2SSGMJFjHdLlba2j1TFsp35GLBPcvU=</HostId></Error>