curl

http://curl.haxx.se/docs/

curl is a tool to transfer data from or to a server, using one of the supported protocols (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, TFTP, DICT, TELNET, LDAP or FILE). The command is designed to work without user interaction.

Install

Linux

apt-get install curl

Windows

Is a standard cygwin package.

Examples

curl "http://myserver/"
curl "http://myserver/" --head
curl -I "http://myserver/"

Note: --head and -I will just display the response headers.

Download

To download a file:

curl -O http://server/repository/appname-0.2.jar

or - how about these options (I don’t know what they do)?:

curl -C - -O http://www.mirror.com/path/to/file.zip

AJAX

curl -H 'X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest' http://localhost:8000/item/123/

GET

I think an HTTP GET request is as simple as doing:

curl "http://127.0.0.1:8888?action=CONFIG"

POST

Using cURL to automate HTTP jobs

Send the specified data in a POST request to the HTTP server:

curl http://127.0.0.1:8888 -d "action=CONFIG&site=ibm"

The data is expected to be url-encoded. The data will be passed to the server using the content-type application/x-www-form-urlencoded.

POST - Binary

curl http://localhost:8983/solr/update --data-binary '<delete><id>SP2514N</id></delete>'

SSL

To tell curl to ignore an SSL certificate:

curl -k "http://suse/"