This example code shows you how to use curl to follow redirects and get final url.
[code]
<?php
function get_final_url( $url, $timeout = 5 )
{
$url = str_replace( "&", "&", urldecode(trim($url)) );
$cookie = tempnam ("/tmp", "CURLCOOKIE");
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041001 Firefox/0.10.1" );
curl_setopt( $ch, ...