curl produces no output

Silent flags hide the failure

curl -sSf --max-time 10 https://example.com

-s alone suppresses the error message and still exits 0. Scripts then treat a failed request as an empty response.

curl -s -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}\n' https://example.com

curl -sSL -X POST -d 'a=1' https://example.com/hook

curl -sS -o body.json https://example.com/api -w '%{http_code} %{time_total}\n'

Redirect output before invoking curl, or add -w. Writing the status to the same stream as the body makes the output unusable.

Scope: failure mode: The silent failure modes and how to surface them.

CliHelper documents failure modes of third-party command line tools. No software is stored or distributed here.