This assumes you have already configured the aws command line tool. If not, check out my article on Getting Started with the AWS CLI.

A Simple Notification Service (SNS) Topic can be used to create notification alerts, such as an email notification. This uses the messaging services pub sub model.

• pub (publish) - create a new alert in a Topic
• sub (subscribe) - get alerts in a Topic

The aws sns list-topics command can be used to list your Simple Notification Service (SNS) Topics.

aws sns list-topics

And here is an example of how to limit the output using the --query option.

aws sns list-topics --query 'Topics[?TopicArn==`arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:12345679012:my-topic`]'

Something like this should be returned if you have not yet created any Topics.

{
    "Topics": []
}

On the other hand, if you have created one or more Topics, something like this should be returned.

{
    "Topics": [
        {
            "TopicArn": "arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:123456789012:my-topic"
        }
    ]
}