On grepping curl output
By chance, I learned today that curl writes its output to stderr, not stdout. Thus, if you want to want to apply grep to curl output, you first need to redirect curl’s output to stdout.
Someone at my company asked about using curl, so here’s the brief sample, modified to their request, that I shared with them:
curl -v --silent https://www.google.com --stderr - | grep -E "^(\* (Connected|Failed) to|< HTTP\/)"
That’s interesting. I was quite confused at first when my original grep command seemed to have no effect!
Bonus: Status Codes Only
Someone else at my company shared this curl command which only returns the status code
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" https://www.bing.com
Clean!