Curl to return http status code along with the response

I was able to get a solution by looking at the curl doc which specifies to use - for the output to get the output to stdout.

curl -o - http://localhost

To get the response with just the http return code, I could just do

curl -o /dev/null -s -w "%{http_code}\n" http://localhost

the verbose mode will tell you everything

curl -v http://localhost

I found this question because I wanted independent access to BOTH the response and the content in order to add some error handling for the user.

Curl allows you to customize output. You can print the HTTP status code to std out and write the contents to another file.

curl -s -o response.txt -w "%{http_code}" http://example.com

This allows you to check the return code and then decide if the response is worth printing, processing, logging, etc.

http_response=$(curl -s -o response.txt -w "%{http_code}" http://example.com)if [ $http_response != "200" ]; then    # handle errorelse    echo "Server returned:"    cat response.txt    fi

The %{http_code} is a variable substituted by curl. You can do a lot more, or send code to stderr, etc. See curl manual and the --write-out option.

-w, --write-out

Make curl display information on stdout after a completedtransfer. The format is a string that may contain plaintext mixed with any number of variables. The format can bespecified as a literal "string", or you can have curl readthe format from a file with "@filename" and to tell curlto read the format from stdin you write "@-".

The variables present in the output format will besubstituted by the value or text that curl thinks fit, asdescribed below. All variables are specified as%{variable_name} and to output a normal % you just writethem as %%. You can output a newline by using \n, acarriage return with \r and a tab space with \t.

The output will be written to standard output, but thiscan be switched to standard error by using %{stderr}.

https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/curl.1.html