How do I get cURL to not show the progress bar?

I'm trying to use cURL in a script and get it to not show the progress bar.

I've tried the -s, -silent, -S, and -quiet options, but none of them work.

Here's a typical command I've tried:

curl -s http://google.com > temp.html

I only get the progress bar when pushing it to a file, so curl -s http://google.com doesn't have a progress bar, but curl -s http://google.com > temp.html does.


curl -s http://google.com > temp.html

works for curl version 7.19.5 on Ubuntu 9.10 (no progress bar). But if for some reason that does not work on your platform, you could always redirect stderr to /dev/null:

curl  http://google.com 2>/dev/null > temp.html

In curl version 7.22.0 on Ubuntu and 7.24.0 on OSX the solution to not show progress but to show errors is to use both -s (--silent) and -S (--show-error) like so:

curl -sS http://google.com > temp.html

This works for both redirected output > /some/file, piped output | less and outputting directly to the terminal for me.

Update: Since curl 7.67.0 there is a new option --no-progress-meter which does precisely this and nothing else, see clonejo's answer for more details.


I found that with curl 7.18.2 the download progress bar is not hidden with:

curl -s http://google.com > temp.html

but it is with:

curl -ss http://google.com > temp.html