curl flags I always forget

I use curl every day and still forget half its flags. Here is the short list I keep coming back to.

The everyday flags

Flag	What it does
-s	Silent: no progress meter or errors
-S	Show errors even with -s (use them together)
-L	Follow redirects
-o file	Write output to a file
-O	Save with the remote filename
-I	Headers only (a HEAD request)
-f	Fail quietly on HTTP errors (good in scripts)
-H	Add a request header
-d	Send a body (implies POST)

The combination I paste most

curl -fsSL https://example.com/script.sh | bash

-f fails instead of piping an error page into your shell, -s hides the progress meter, -S still shows a real error if one happens, and -L follows the redirect. That set is why so many install one-liners look identical.

Inspecting a response

curl -sI https://example.com        # just the headers
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" https://example.com   # just the status code

The second one is my go-to for a quick "is it up and what does it return" check.