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Comment by ralph | Hacker News Reader

I rarely find I use curl's -s without its -S, e.g. -sS. It seems curl's design is flawed in its definition of -s; perhaps it's historic and it was too late to change it.

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The junk goes to stderr, so it won't impact anything but your screen when used from the command line. And sometimes (large transfers) you want that information. I think the default is sane. When you're using curl in a script you use -s, when you're using it interactively you want the diagnostics.

Yes, sometimes when it's a particularly large transfer I want a progress meter but I normally don't so it's in the way; perhaps when we all had modems. And from a script I'd still want to use -sS instead of -s because although the script is obviously checking curl's exit value the user wants to see curl's specific complaint before the script's own knock-on diagnostic.

    $ curl -s does.not.exist; echo $?
    6
    $ curl -sS does.not.exist; echo $?
    curl: (6) Couldn't resolve host 'does.not.exist'
    6
    $

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