How to cURL?

This blog post aims to provide a high level overview of the different ways that the users can use cURL - a powerful command line tool that can be used to transfer data to and from a server.

Curl can be used to automate the process of sending data to or retrieving data from the server without the need for user intervention and is a preferred utility for automation. The supported protocols are: HTTP, FTP, IMAP, POP3, SCP, SFTP, SMTP, TFTP, TELNET, LDAP or FILE. cURL is powered by the Libcurl.

Syntax

The basic syntax for curl is as shown below. For in-detail information, check out the man page!

curl [options] [URL...]

Use cases

The most basic usecase is to use curl along with a URL for a website to see the data that the server contains. 

curl https://www.google.com/

Another example is to download a file from an FTP server:

curl -u {user}:{pass} -# -o hello.zip ftp://ftp.example.com/file.zip

Options:
-# : This shows the progress bar for the download.
-o : This allows the user to specify the name of the file as how you would want to store it on the disk. Another option is to use -O. This will save the file with the same name as stored in the server.
-u : Allows to specify the credentials if used in the sever.

There are many more use cases for curl, but i think these two examples were what I used the most while developing code or troubleshooting a connectivity issue over VPN.

Source: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/curl-command-in-linux-with-examples/

And that’s all for this blog post! I hope you learned something new! ☺️