cURL: how to suppress strange output when redirecting?

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.

curl --fail --silent --show-error http://www.example.com/ > /dev/null

This will suppress the status dialog, but will otherwise output errors to STDERR.

user@host:~# curl http://www.yahoo.com > /dev/null
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  254k    0  254k    0     0   403k      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--  424k

The above outputs the status table when redirecting.

user@host:~# curl --fail --silent --show-error http://www.yahoo.com > /dev/null

The above suppresses the status table when redirecting, but errors will still go to STDERR.

user@host:~# curl --fail --silent --show-error http://www.errorexample.com > /dev/null
curl: (6) Couldn't resolve host 'www.errorexample.com'

The above is an example of an error to STDERR.

user@host:~# curl -v --fail --silent --show-error http://www.errorexample.com > ~/output.txt 2>&1
user@host:~# cat ~/output.txt 
* getaddrinfo(3) failed for www.errorexample.com:80
* Couldn't resolve host 'www.errorexample.com'
* Closing connection #0
curl: (6) Couldn't resolve host 'www.errorexample.com'

Just add 2>&1 to the end to redirect STDERR to STDOUT (in this case, to a file).

According to man curl:

-s, --silent : Silent or quiet mode. Don't show progress meter or error messages. Makes Curl mute.

Example usage:

curl -s 'http://www.google.com'

or if you want to capture the HTTP-BODY into a variable in bash

BODY=$( curl -s 'http://www.google.com' )
echo $BODY

You can use -s or --silent interchangeably.