Small, Sharp Software Tools

Downloading Files

This book has some code examples and data files you can use as you work through the book. Instead of using a browser to download these files, you can download them right from the command line.

The curl command, which you’ll learn about in detail in ​Making Web Requests with cURL​, lets you download documents from web servers to your machine, just like a browser would. And the unzip command will let you unzip archives you downloaded.

First, check to see if curl is installed. You can use the which command to do that. You’ll learn more about this command later in ​Locating Executables with PATH​.

$ which curl

If the result is blank, install curl using your package manager just like you did with tree.

Then, check to ...