On Tue, August 2, 2011 16:16, Dan Fandrich wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 02, 2011 at 04:07:08PM -0400, James B. Byrne wrote:
>> The problem we discovered with --head is that even with the
>> --silent
>> option it causes this to be displayed in STDOUT:
>>
>> Content-Length: 0
>
> Yes, that's what --head requests.
>
>> expected occurrence. This I do not want. Nor do I wish to
>> redirect STDOUT, for other reasons.
>
> Then use the special curl option "-o /dev/null" and avoid the need
> to redirect stdout yourself :-)
>
>> Grep is a workable solution. In fact, that was our original
>> approach. The difficulty being that the switch to cURL away from
>> the basic ftp client was to get rid of that very idiom and avoid
>> having to parse output to STDOUT. I just wanted a simple exit
>> code and nothing else. And I just cannot seem to get it.
>
> Those two additional options should do it. Don't forget that curl
> is designed to transfer files, so outputing absolutely nothing goes
> against its philosophy.
>

Thanks for that.

Going cross-grain to others philosophies seems to be a trait of
mine. I have no idea why. But to me, where present, a --silent or
--quiet option should mean absolute silence, no stdout at all.
--sulk is probably more apt if a program insists on saying something
when it is told to shut up.

I will give the -o option a whirl. But even when I get the output
to quieten I am still left with the return code of 18, for which I
have no explanation.

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James B. Byrne                mailto:ByrneJB_at_Harte-Lyne.ca
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