Testing if a server is up with curl and grep. Grep adds headings?

Question

Hi I'm trying to see if a server I'm running has been stopped (if it has, it returns a 502 Bad Gateway message.)

So I tried to do this :

curl http://MY_URL | grep "502"

The curl part returns what I expect it to.

But when I pipe it into grep, grep seems to be adding a bunch of headings :

  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
113   682  113   682    0     0   230k      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--  666k

These aren't in the output from curl. And grep on ordinary text files doesn't add them. So why are they getting added to curl piped through grep?

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 18 '13 at 00:31

2

That output is from curl. It's added when standard output is not a terminal, and in some other circumstances. Use curl -s if you don't want to see it.

answered Mar 18 '13 at 00:31

Michael Hampton

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Weird behaviour though, isn't it? To produce different output depending on whether it's going to the terminal or stdout. I thought unix tools were meant to ignore that kind of context. – interstar Mar 18 '13 at 00:43
Don't ask me, I didn't write it. – Michael Hampton Mar 18 '13 at 00:45

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 18 '13 at 00:33

1

It is not a grep proble, but a curl feature. Try it with cat and you will see.

You can deal around it with -s (suppress the progress meter), an -o output .

Man curl for more.

answered Mar 18 '13 at 00:33

Brigo

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Testing if a server is up with curl and grep. Grep adds headings?

2 Answers2