I was trying to read up on it and just based off of the manual it seems not to make sense if I’m not using --silent alongside it, but I found this one article stating otherwise: https://nrogap.medium.com/show-error-response-for-curl-64666cd64330
I can’t figure out if it’s just AI slop or badly researched since it doesn’t even show a real URL to test the commands against.
Manual entry:
-S, --show-error
When used with -s, --silent, it
makes curl show an error message
if it fails.
This option is global and does not
need to be specified for each use
of -:, --next.
Providing -S, --show-error multi‐
ple times has no extra effect.
Disable it again with --no-show-
error.
Example:
curl --show-error --silent https://
example.com
See also --no-progress-meter.


Over the past five or so years I’ve been regressing my own linux problem solving and question answering process back to a combination of first party documentation and directly observed results.
It’s been a long strange trip, but I think the days of being able to “just google it” are officially over.
Yes, it’s usually more efficient for more niche topics.
Luckily many things still come up with searches, be it stackoverflow or other kinds of forums, the real problem are the SEO spam articles and AI generated stuff (and worse still when they coexist), so it’s becoming harder to discern what is worthwhile and what isn’t. When all else fails I also always try to find my answers by playing around myself