curl (Command Line Tool) Reference
Kip Landergren
(Updated: )
My cheat sheet for curl covering common commands, documentation links, and frequently asked questions.
Contents
Commands
Note: when in doubt, read the man page—it has a wealth of information.
Non-exhaustive list of commonly used options:
| --verbose | -v | verbose |
| --silent | -s | no progress meter or error messages |
| --http1.1 | ||
| --http2 | ||
| --http3 | ||
| --insecure | -k | |
| --output | -o | e.g. --output /dev/null |
Examples
Make a request verbosely, silently (no progress meter or error messages), and write the output (but not the
curl --verbose --silent --output /dev/null https://example.com
Make a request verbosely, ignoring insecure certificate warnings, to a custom IP address X.X.X.X for a specific host and port pair:
curl --verbose \
--insecure \
--resolve 'example.com:443:X.X.X.X' \
'https://example.com'
Write headers to a file:
curl --dump-header headers.txt \
example.com
Write headers to a file and suppress final output and progress:
curl --silent \
--dump-header headers.txt \
--output /dev/null \
example.com
Save a remote file locally as some-file.txt, short-form:
curl -O example.com/some-file.txt
Save a remote file locally as some-file.txt, long-form:
curl --remote-name example.com/some-file.txt
Specify headers:
curl -H 'X-Foo: A' -H 'X-Bar: B' example.com
POST with JSON data:
curl -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -X POST -d '{}' example.com
Options
| --verbose | |
| --location | follow redirects |
| --output |
write output to file; use --output /dev/null to hide response contents |
Documentation
- GitHub repository
- Official Documentation Overview
FAQ
Why does curl sometimes appear to be stylized as “cURL” with capitalized “URL”?
“cURL”, with the capitalized “URL”, refers to the project, where curl refers to the command line utility and libcurl refers to the C Library.
More info available from the official FAQ question “What is cURL?”.
What do the >, <, and * mean when --verbose is used?
| > | header data sent by curl |
| < | header data received by curl |
| * | additional info provided by curl |
From the man page for the --verbose option:
Makes curl verbose during the operation. Useful for debugging and seeing what's going on "under the hood". A line starting with '>' means "header data" sent by curl, '<' means "header data" received by curl that is hidden in normal cases, and a line starting with '*' means additional info provided by curl.