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.


https://httpbin.org/
But yeah I think that medium article is just wrong. Medium is not a trustworthy source for anything, because it’s just a slop monetization platform.
I think so too, but I wanted a confirmation. I tried that website as well, but with it I could only get error messages if I also provide
--failto error on HTTP error codes