Macintosh Terminal Pocket Guide

Name

curl — stdin  stdout  - file  -- opt  --help  --version

Synopsis

curl [options] [URLs]

The curl command hits a URL and downloads the data to a file or standard output. It’s great for capturing web pages or downloading files. For example, let’s capture the Yahoo home page:

➜ curl http://www.yahoo.com > mypage.html

which is saved to a file mypage.html in the current directory. If you provide multiple URLs, they’ll all be appended to mypage.html.

Perhaps the most useful feature of curl is its ability to download files without needing a web browser:

➜ curl -O http://www.example.com/files/manual.pdf

You can write shell scripts to download sets of files if you know their names. (See Programming with Shell Scripts for details.) This line downloads files 1.mpeg through 3.mpeg from example.com:

➜ for i in 1 2 3; do \
  curl -o $i.mpeg http://example.com/$i.mpeg; done

curl can resume a large download if it gets interrupted in the middle, say, due to a network failure: just run curl -C with the same target URL in the following way:

➜ curl -o myfile http://example.com/some_big_file
Transfer gets interrupted. Now run:
➜ cat myfile | curl -C - -o myfile \
  http://example.com/some_big_file

This sends the partial myfile to curl for analysis, then resumes the download. curl has over 100 options, so we’ll cover just a few important ones.

Useful options

-o filename	Write the retrieved data to the given file. Otherwise it’s written to standard output.
-O	Write the retrieved data to a file with the same name as the ...