Making curl send errors to stderr and everything else to stdout

Question

Is there a way to tell curl to output errors to stderr, and everything else to stdout?

The reason is that I am using curl from the command line (actually a cronjob) to upload a file to an FTP site every evening. Unfortunately because curl outputs status information on stderr, I receive an e-mail about an error when nothing actually went wrong. (I'm redirecting stdout to a log file, but leaving stderr unchanged so that cron will e-mail it to me if there is any output.)

There are options to make curl silent, or output everything to stdout, however both these alternatives prevent errors from appearing on stderr - meaning I won't get an e-mail when there is actually an error I want to know about.

So is there a way to make curl only output errors on stderr, but leave normal output intact on stdout?

Answer 1

Try this:

# No error messages because it succeeds.
curl  http://www.shikadi.net/        --fail --silent --show-error

# This prints an error message to stderr
curl  http://i.like.you.def.maybe/   --fail --silent --show-error

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Thanks to Russell Davis's answer on this page, man curl, and trial and error. For the curious, here is the wget version of the question: https://superuser.com/questions/420120/wget-is-silent-but-it-displays-error-messages