Curl download curl download file

Today we'll be walking you through the basics of using curl to download a file. Our sample file will be the readme for blcli, BitLaunch's command-line interface , which is hosted on GitHub.

In the case of our readme, the complete command would like this:. So what if we want to use cURL to save a file to our server? For that, we must use the -O option:. You'll notice that cURL will display a download progress table rather than the file contents this time:.

If you'd like the file to have a different file name perhaps readme is too bossy for you , specify it after -O :. That's all well and good, but downloading lots of files in this way would quickly become a hassle. The number of bytes can be abbreviated by appending a suffix: kilobytes k or K , megabytes m or M , and gigabytes g or G. Do not! If you do not know the exact value of the offset, do not worry, you just need to specify -C - to tell cURL to automatically find out that value.

If the requested file requires basic authentication, you need to use the -u option followed by the credential which is in the form of user:password :. To read more about basic authentication, you can read the article 3 methods to use basic authentication with cURL. If you use a hyphen - as the offset, curl will look at the already downloaded portion of the file and determine the correct offset to use for itself.

Using xargs we can download multiple URLs at once. Perhaps we want to download a series of web pages that make up a single article or tutorial. This is the command we need to use to have xargs pass these URLs to curl one at a time:. The -n 1 option tells xargs to treat each line of the text file as a single parameter. Checking in the file browser shows the multiple files have been downloaded.

Each one bears the name it had on the remote server. Using curl with a File Transfer Protocol FTP server is easy, even if you have to authenticate with a username and password. This is a free-for-testing FTP server hosted by Rebex. Use the same command as a moment ago, with the filename appended to it:.

In almost all cases, it is going to be more convenient to have the retrieved file saved to disk for us, rather than displayed in the terminal window. Once more we can use the -O remote file output command to have the file saved to disk, with the same filename that it has on the remote server.

The file is retrieved and saved to disk. We can use ls to check the file details. It has the same name as the file on the FTP server, and it is the same length, bytes. Some remote servers will accept parameters in requests that are sent to them. The parameters might be used to format the returned data, for example, or they may be used to select the exact data that the user wishes to retrieve.

It is often possible to interact with web application programming interfaces APIs using curl. As a simple example, the ipify website has an API can be queried to ascertain your external IP address. It returns a JSON object describing a book. You can find these on the back cover of most books, usually below a barcode. Especially if the protocol was one of the many not supported by wget.

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