curl(1)

NAME
curl - transfer a URL

SYNOPSIS
curl [options] [URL...]

DESCRIPTION
curl is a tool to transfer data from or to a server, using one of the supported protocols (DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, GOPHER, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, LDAP, LDAPS, POP3, POP3S, RTMP, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, SMB, SMBS, SMTP, SMTPS, TELNET and TFTP). The command is designed to work without user interaction. curl offers a busload of useful tricks like proxy support, user authentication, FTP upload, HTTP post, SSL connections, cookies, file transfer resume, Metalink, and more. As you will see below, the number of features will make your head spin! curl is powered by libcurl for all transfer-related features. See libcurl(3) for details.

URL
The URL syntax is protocol-dependent. You'll find a detailed description in RFC 3986. You can specify multiple URLs or parts of URLs by writing part sets within braces as in:
  http://site.{one,two,three}.com or you can get sequences of alphanumeric series by using [] as in:
  ftp://ftp.example.com/file[1-100].txt
  ftp://ftp.example.com/file[001-100].txt (with leading zeros)
  ftp://ftp.example.com/file[a-z].txt Nested sequences are not supported, but you can use several ones next to each other:
  http://example.com/archive[1996-1999]/vol[1-4]/part{a,b,c}.html You can specify any amount of URLs on the command line. They will be fetched in a sequential manner in the specified order. You can specify a step counter for the ranges to get every Nth number or letter:
  http://example.com/file[1-100:10].txt
  http://example.com/file[a-z:2].txt When using [] or {} sequences when invoked from a command line prompt, you probably have to put the full URL within double quotes to avoid the shell from interfering with it. This also goes for other characters treated special, like for example '&', '?' and '*'. Provide the IPv6 zone index in the URL with an escaped percentage sign and the interface name. Like in
  http://[fe80::3%25eth0]/ If you specify URL without protocol:// prefix, curl will attempt to guess what protocol you might want. It will then default to HTTP but try other protocols based on often-used host name prefixes. For example, for host names starting with "ftp." curl will assume you want to speak FTP. curl will do its best to use what you pass to it as a URL. It is not trying to validate it as a syntactically correct URL by any means but is instead very liberal with what it accepts. curl will attempt to re-use connections for multiple file transfers, so that getting many files from the same server will not do multiple connects / handshakes. This improves speed. Of course this is only done on files specified on a single command line and cannot be used between separate curl invokes.

PROGRESS METER
curl normally displays a progress meter during operations, indicating the amount of transferred data, transfer speeds and estimated time left, etc. The progress meter displays number of bytes and the speeds are in bytes per second. The suffixes (k, M, G, T, P) are 1024 based. For example 1k is 1024 bytes. 1M is 1048576 bytes. curl displays this data to the terminal by default, so if you invoke curl to do an operation and it is about to write data to the terminal, it disables the progress meter as otherwise it would mess up the output mixing progress meter and response data. If you want a progress meter for HTTP POST or PUT requests, you need to redirect the response output to a file, using shell redirect (>), --output or similar. It is not the same case for FTP upload as that operation does not spit out any response data to the terminal. If you prefer a progress "bar" instead of the regular meter, --progress-bar is your friend. You can also disable the progress meter completely with the --silent option.

OPTIONS
Options start with one or two dashes. Many of the options require an additional value next to them. The short "single-dash" form of the options, -d for example, may be used with or without a space between it and its value, although a space is a recommended separator. The long "double-dash" form, --data for example, requires a space between it and its value. Short version options that don't need any additional values can be used immediately next to each other, like for example you can specify all the options -O, -L and -v at once as -OLv. In general, all boolean options are enabled with --option and yet again disabled with --no-option. That is, you use the exact same option name but prefix it with "no-". However, in this list we mostly only list and show the --option version of them. (This concept with --no options was added in 7.19.0. Previously most options were toggled on/off on repeated use of the same command line option.)