Linux Administration Cookbook

cURL

If you've ever used an open source OS, of any sort, there's a good chance that cURL has been bundled alongside it, and as a result you will find its license agreements under the license agreements page (things such as game consoles, intelligent cars, and fridges usually feature a build of cURL). However, it's generally always available to you on the command line, and, as a result, it's a favorite of a lot of admins. This is partly because cURL features an extensive (and highly detailed) list of exit codes:

1. For example, curling the BBC results in the following:

$ curl bbc.co.uk$ echo $?0

The curl command was successful, so we got a 0 exit code, which pretty much universally means OK.

 

We can try to curl an illegal URL:

$ curl bbc.co.uks ...