§2023-06-02

¶Curl: What is it good for?

Curl is a command-line tool that allows us to do HTTP requests from shell. It also covers many other protocols, like FTP, though they go beyond the scope of this tutorial.

Its name stands for “Client URL”, and it was developed by Swedish developer Daniel Stenberg. It is an open source project, and its code can be found here, in case you feel like contributing.

% curl --help
Usage: curl [options...] <url>
 -d, --data <data>          HTTP POST data
 -f, --fail                 Fail fast with no output on HTTP errors
 -h, --help <category>      Get help for commands
 -i, --include              Include protocol response headers in the output
 -o, --output <file>        Write to file instead of stdout
 -O, --remote-name          Write output to a file named as the remote file
 -s, --silent               Silent mode
 -T, --upload-file <file>   Transfer local FILE to destination
 -u, --user <user:password> Server user and password
 -A, --user-agent <name>    Send User-Agent <name> to server
 -v, --verbose              Make the operation more talkative
 -V, --version              Show version number and quit

This is not the full help, this menu is stripped into categories.
Use "--help category" to get an overview of all categories.
For all options use the manual or "--help all".