A primer on cURL

cURL is a powerful utility that supports protocols, such as HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP. It supports many features including POST, cookies, authentication, downloading partial files from a specified offset, referer, user agent string, extra headers, limit speed, maximum file size, progress bar, and so on. cURL is very useful when we play around with automating a web page usage sequence, and to retrieve data. This recipe is a list of the most important features of cURL.

Getting ready

cURL mostly doesn't come with any Linux distros; you may have to install it by using the package manager. By default, distributions ship with wget.

cURL usually dumps the downloaded files to stdout, and progress information to stderr. To avoid the progress information from being shown, we use the --silent option.

How to do it…

The curl command can be used to perform different activities, such as downloading, sending different HTTP requests, and specifying HTTP headers. Let's see how we can perform different...