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That also causes curl to change the underlying request to a HEAD request. Though according to the spec they should return the same headers, it’s not uncommon for sites to fail to do so (some web frameworks leave this responsibility to the user) or to cache these responses differently.

Personally I reflexively use the verbose version they used for these kind of investigations of server behavior after being bit a few times.

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Same here, I thought it caused cURL to do a GET request and throw away the body, but it doesn't, and I've gotten different results more than once.

Also consider changing the user-agent from the default. I set mine to a typical browser string in ~/.curlrc, but you can also use -A/--user-agent on the command line.

curl -i (lowercase) prints the headers as well as the response body without the verbosity of -v

I believe you can also control what exactly is emitted with -w, which is nicer than trying to parse it later.

I use -i instead of -v -o /dev/null; is there any reason to prefer the latter? Is Curl smart enough to skip fetching the response body with the latter?

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