How to suppress cUrl's progress meter when redirecting the output?

bash redirection curl pipe stderr

113,144

Solution 1

Try this:

curl -vs -o /dev/null http://somehost/somepage 2>&1

That will suppress the progress meter, send stdout to /dev/null and redirect stderr (the -v output) to stdout.

Solution 2

curl --fail --silent --show-error http://www.example.com/ > /dev/null

This will suppress the status dialog, but will otherwise output errors to STDERR.

user@host:~# curl http://www.yahoo.com > /dev/null
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  254k    0  254k    0     0   403k      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--  424k

The above outputs the status table when redirecting.

user@host:~# curl --fail --silent --show-error http://www.yahoo.com > /dev/null

The above suppresses the status table when redirecting, but errors will still go to STDERR.

user@host:~# curl --fail --silent --show-error http://www.errorexample.com > /dev/null
curl: (6) Couldn't resolve host 'www.errorexample.com'

The above is an example of an error to STDERR.

user@host:~# curl -v --fail --silent --show-error http://www.errorexample.com > ~/output.txt 2>&1
user@host:~# cat ~/output.txt 
* getaddrinfo(3) failed for www.errorexample.com:80
* Couldn't resolve host 'www.errorexample.com'
* Closing connection #0
curl: (6) Couldn't resolve host 'www.errorexample.com'

Just add 2>&1 to the end to redirect STDERR to STDOUT (in this case, to a file).

Solution 3

According to man curl:

-s, --silent : Silent or quiet mode. Don't show progress meter or error messages. Makes Curl mute.

Example usage:

curl -s 'http://www.google.com'

or if you want to capture the HTTP-BODY into a variable in bash

BODY=$( curl -s 'http://www.google.com' )
echo $BODY

You can use -s or --silent interchangeably.

Solution 4

With reference to question 1 (how cURL knows to only display the table when output is redirected), I didn't realise a program could tell its outputs were being directed, but it seems on POSIX systems there is a function isatty which reports whether or not a file descriptor refers to a terminal.

Solution 5

Modern versions of curl now have the option --no-progress-meter which disables only the progress meter you are referencing.

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113,144

Aishwarya R

Updated on September 17, 2022

Comments

Aishwarya R over 1 year
I'm trying to print just the verbose sections of a cURL request (which are sent to stderr) from the bash shell.

But when I redirect stdout like this:
```
curl -v http://somehost/somepage > /dev/null
```
Some sort of results table appears in the middle of the output to stderr:
```
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
  0     0    0     0    0     0      0      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--     0
```
Followed by this near the end:
```
{ [data not shown]
118   592    0   592    0     0  15714      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 25739
```
Which makes the response headers less readable.

I don't see this text when not redirecting.

Another way to see the effects:

Table doesn't appear:
```
curl -v http://somehost/somepage 2>&1
```
Table appears:
```
curl -v http://somehost/somepage 2>&1 | cat
```
1. How come this shows up only with certain types of redirects?
2. What's the neatest way to suppress it?
Aishwarya R almost 14 years

Thanks, -s was the key!
Dennis Williamson almost 14 years

Here's a Bash snippet: [[ -p /dev/stdout ]] && echo "stdout is to a pipe"; [[ -t 1 ]] && echo "output to terminal"; [[ ! -t 1 && ! -p /dev/stdout ]] && echo "output redirected"
Artyom about 10 years

@IanMackinnon Note that with -s but without -v you will not see errors such as failure to connect. For that you should also add -S (or --show-error) as in mhoydis's answer.
sixty4bit almost 5 years

but why does the progress bar only appear in the first place when redirecting? I ran into this same issue when piping the output of curl to jq. No progress bar without piping to jq, then when piping to jq I have to go back and add -s.
Dennis Williamson almost 5 years

@sixty4bit: That's a design choice the developers made. The program can detect when its STDOUT isn't a tty. When output is not being piped, you don't want progress information to be interspersed with normal output, which you can see and have some idea of progress. When output is redirected or piped, you can't see it so you have no gauge for progress - unless the progress bar is turned on.
siikamiika almost 4 years

According to the cURL manpage, this feature was added in 7.67.0 which was released on November 6 2019.