I'd like to do a health check of a service by calling a specific url on it. Feels like the simplest solution would be to use cron to do the check every minute or so. In case of errors, cron sends me an email.

I tried using cUrl for this but I can't get it to output messages only on errors. If I try to direct output to /dev/null, it prints out progress report.

  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  5559  100  5559    0     0   100k      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--  106k

I tried looking through the curl options but I just can't find anything to suit the situation where you want it to be silent on success but make noise on errors.

Is there a way to make curl do what I want or is there some other tool I should be looking at?