cURL

cURL is a command line tool and library for transferring data with URLs. The command supports a number of different protocols, including HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SCP, and SFTP. It is also designed to work without user interaction, like in scripts.

Installation

Install the curl package.

Usage

Downloading

A common use case for cURL is to download the resource to a specified file:

$ curl -o file name URL

If the URL contains the file name, you can save the resource directly to a file of that name:

$ curl -O URL

Similarly, you can use -J to accept a hint from an HTTP server (from the Content-Disposition header) for what the file should be named. If combined with -O, curl will use the file name specified by the URL if the HTTP server does not return a file name hint in its response.

Alternatively you can print the resource to stdout by omitting the output options:

$ curl URL

HTTP POST

You can use cURL to make HTTP POST requests:

$ curl -d 'request body' URL

If the request body cannot fit on the command line, cURL can read it from a file:

$ curl -d @file name URL

Sometimes, you may need to specify a custom value for the Content-Type header (cURL's default is application/x-www-form-urlencoded). You can do this with -H. For example, if you wanted to make a POST request with a JSON body:

$ curl -d 'json body' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' URL
gollark: In case I need the raw HTML later.
gollark: It doesn't ignore robots.txt, I just manually whitelist sites.
gollark: But it's non-evil, so I would set it to 0, silly.
gollark: When it downloads a page, it stores:- the raw HTML of it, gzipped- the extracted text of it- a timestamp- the frequency of every word (well, token) in the page- every link from that page
gollark: Because of the way it works it uses a *lot* more space than just the size of the page, so it would use all my storage very fast.

See also
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