How do I silence the HEAD of a curl request while using the silent flag?

Question

When I run the curl command and direct the data to a file, I get back the content of the site as expected.

$ curl "www.site.com" > file.txt
$ head file.txt
Top of site
...

However, this command shows a progress bar, which I do not want:

  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  328k  100  328k    0     0   467k      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--  467k

I can silence the progress bar by passing the -silent flag, but then my file output will have head content attached:

$ curl -silient "www.site.com" > file.txt
$ head file.txt
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Security-Policy: default-src 'none'
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
X-Frame-Options: deny
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=31536000
ETag: "29647904ffa6a6b36cf3483b325138cab9447a13"
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Cache-Control: max-age=300
Content-Length: 335978  

How can I silence both the progress bar and avoid getting head content sent to the file?

Based on the provided flags, it seems like I can only get one or the other.

This is what I'm doing right now to solve the problem, but I'm not sure if it's a good idea to pipe the progress bar and possibly any errors into /dev/null.

curl "www.site.com" > file.txt 2> /dev/null

The reason I don't think this is a good idea is because it may interfere with the actual errors that I care about. I'd like to utilize the silent flag if that's what it was intended for.

I've also tried all the same commands using the -o to output to a file, but to no prevail.

Answer 1

You need to use --silent with two dashes. Your “option” -silient (sic!) enables the -s, -i, -l, -e, -n and -t options.

-i is what includes the HTTP header.

Answer 2

Try this:

curl --silent "www.site.com" > file.txt

If you wish, you can use the shorthand -s.