It's not magic -- it's some form of crude error.

So first off what this does is, it expands to the expression:

    '-o /dev/null' '-o /dev/null '

Even if we remove the latter space by just using `{,}` instead of `{,\ }` curl still returns for me an error code 23 -- CURLE_WRITE_ERROR.

curl seems to interpret `'-o /wtf'` as a command to write to the file ` /wtf`, so this only makes sense if you have a directory called ` ` in the folder you're running from.

You can therefore do this correctly with:

    -o/dev/null{,}

and that correctly writes the contents to /dev/null without issuing a curl write error.

Thanks, it sure looks less ugly with -o/dev/null{,} I couldn't find any other way to get curl to stay silent and still output redirect times. Hence the crude hack. (Obviously my bash and curl versions had no problem with the spaces or I wouldn't have posted it)

Using the curl'ing tips up this branch of comments I programmed a highly sophisticated script and dropped it on github. :)

https://github.com/dougsimmons/301debate

Nice!

I would have gone for a simpler loop:

echo -e "sec\tmethod\turl";for url in {https,http}://{www.,}{en.wikipedia.org,{google,reddit,facebook,youtube,netflix,amazon,twitter,linkedin,msn}.com,google.co.in}; do curl -sL "$url" -w "%{time_redirect}\t${url%:}\t${url#//}\n" -o/dev/null; done|sort

Wow. Thanks for teaching me that. Yeah, yours is better, I'll lay it on github with a thank you and maybe "embrace and extend" it.

Or learn python and port it to python, I could swing it that way.. Cheers.