> My version of curl only prints the progress junk to stderr if you pipe stdout somewhere. Hmm, good point -- I actually hadn't noticed that, and it seems to b

> My version of curl only prints the progress junk to stderr if you pipe stdout somewhere. Hmm, good point -- I actually hadn't noticed that, and it seems to be the case on mine as well. (Though I rarely use it without piping or stdout-redirecting to something, so it still strikes me as inappropriate.) > BTW, how do you detect whether your program's stdout is being piped to something other than the shell? In the three languages I've used recently enough to remember: C: int isatty(int fd); /* from unistd.h */ Python: os.isatty Shell (bourne): [ -t 1 ] # exits 0 if stdout is a tty, 1 if not