Curl command
Introduction
• cURL is a software package which consists of
command line tool
• a library for transferring data using URL syntax.
• cURL supports various protocols like, DICT, FILE, FTP,
FTPS, Gopher, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, LDAP,
LDAPS, POP3, POP3S, RTMP, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, SMTP,
SMTPS, Telnet and TFTP.
• We can use the curl command to call web services
right from UNIX command prompt.
• receive a response
• check whether our server is healthy or not.
• We can write testing and monitoring scripts
using curl command.
• It's similar to wget command, which is also used for
HTTP requests but it's much more powerful and
supports many protocols.
Download a Single File
• The following command will get the content of the
URL and display it in the STDOUT (i.e on your
terminal).
• # curl url_name
• To store the output in a file, you an redirect it as
shown below.
• This will also display some additional download
statistics.
• # curl url_name > filename
Save the cURL Output to a file
• We can save the result of the curl command to a file by
using -o/-O options.
• -o (lowercase o) the result will be saved in the filename
provided in the command line
• # curl -o filename url_name
• -O (uppercase O) the filename in the URL will be taken
and it will be used as the filename to store the result
• # curl -O url_name
Fetch Multiple Files at a time
• We can download multiple files in a single shot by
specifying the URLs on the command line.
• # curl –O url_name1 –O url_name2
• The command will download both the url content
and save it in the same name under the current
directory.
Follow HTTP Location Headers with -L option
• By default CURL doesn’t follow the HTTP Location
headers.
• It is also termed as Redirects.
• When a requested web page is moved to another
place, then an HTTP Location header will be sent as
a Response
• it will have where the actual web page is located.
• # curl http://www.google.com
• # curl –L http://www.google.com
Continue/Resume a Previous Download
• Using curl -C option, we can continue a download
which was stopped already for some reason.
• This will be helpful when we download large files,
and the download got interrupted.
• If we say ‘-C -‘, then curl will find from where to
start resuming the download.
• We can also give an offset ‘-C <offset>’. The given
offset bytes will be skipped from the beginning for
the source file.
• Start a big download using curl, and press Ctrl-C to
stop it in between the download.
• # curl –O url_name
• # curl –C - -O url_name
Limit the Rate of Data Transfer
• we can limit the amount at which the data gets
transferred using –limit-rate option.
• we can specify the maximum transfer rate as
argument.
• # curl --limit-rate 1000B url_name
• The above command is limiting the data transfer to
1000 Bytes/second.
Download a file only if it is modified before/after
the given time
• We can get the files that are modified after a particular
time using -z option in curl.
• This will work for both FTP & HTTP.
• # curl –z date url_name
• # curl –z -21-apr-2019 http://ftp/reva.edu.in
• The above command will download the content only if it
is modified later than the given date.
• # curl –z -date url_name
• The above command will download the content, if it is
modified before than the given date.
Pass HTTP Authentication in
cURL
• Sometime, websites will require a username and
password to view the content
• With the help of -u option, we can pass those
credentials from cURL to the web server
• # curl –u username:password url_name
Download Files from FTP server
• cURL can also be used to download files from FTP
servers.
• If the given FTP path is a directory, by default it will
list the files under the specific directory.
• # curl –u ftpuser:ftppass –O ftp_sername
Upload Files to FTP Server
• Curl can also be used to upload files to the FTP
server with -T option.
• # curl –u ftpuser:ftppass –T myfile.txt ftp_sername
• The above command will upload the file named
myfile.txt to the FTP server.
Get Definition of a Word using DICT Protocol
• we can use cURL to get the definition for a word
with the help of DICT protocol.
• We need to pass a Dictionary Server URL to it.
• # curl dict://dict.org/d:bash
• # curl dict://dict.org/d:bash:foldoc
