cURL: how to suppress strange output when redirecting?

Question

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.

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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

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1) How come this shows up only with certain types of redirects?

2) What's the neatest way to suppress it?

Thank you

Answer 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.

Answer 2

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.