How do I pipe or redirect the output of curl -v?

For some reason the output always gets printed to the terminal, regardless of whether I redirect it via 2> or > or |. Is there a way to get around this? Why is this happening?

add the -s (silent) option to remove the progress meter, then redirect stderr to stdout to get verbose output on the same fd as the response body

curl -vs google.com 2>&1 | less

Your URL probably has ampersands in it. I had this problem, too, and I realized that my URL was full of ampersands (from CGI variables being passed) and so everything was getting sent to background in a weird way and thus not redirecting properly. If you put quotes around the URL it will fix it.

The answer above didn't work for me, what did eventually was this syntax:

curl https://${URL} &> /dev/stdout | tee -a ${LOG}

tee puts the output on the screen, but also appends it to my log.

If you need the output in a file you can use a redirect:

curl https://vi.stackexchange.com/ -vs >curl-output.txt 2>&1

Please be sure not to flip the >curl-output.txt and 2>&1, which will not work due to bash's redirection behavior.

Just my 2 cents. The below command should do the trick, as answered earlier

curl -vs google.com 2>&1

However if need to get the output to a file,

curl -vs google.com > out.txt 2>&1

should work.

I found the same thing: curl by itself would print to STDOUT, but could not be piped into another program.

At first, I thought I had solved it by using xargs to echo the output first:

curl -s ... <url> | xargs -0 echo | ...

But then, as pointed out in the comments, it also works without the xargs part, so -s (silent mode) is the key to preventing extraneous progress output to STDOUT:

curl -s ... <url> | perl  -ne 'print $1 if /<sometag>([^<]+)/'

The above example grabs the simple <sometag> content (containing no embedded tags) from the XML output of the curl statement.

The following worked for me:

Put your curl statement in a script named abc.sh

Now run:

sh abc.sh 1>stdout_output 2>stderr_output

You will get your curl's results in stdout_output and the progress info in stderr_output.

This simple example shows how to capture curl output, and use it in a bash script

test.sh

function main
{
  \curl -vs 'http://google.com'  2>&1
  # note: add -o /tmp/ignore.png if you want to ignore binary output, by saving it to a file. 
}

# capture output of curl to a variable
OUT=$(main)

# search output for something using grep.
echo
echo "$OUT" | grep 302 
echo
echo "$OUT" | grep title 

Solution = curl -vs google.com 2>&1 | less

BUT, if you want to redirect the output to a file and the output is still on the screen, then the URL response contains a newline char \n which messed up your shell.

To avoit this put everything in a variable:

result=$(curl -v . . . . )