Curl Cheatsheet

curl is used in the command line or in scripts to transfer data. It is also used nearly everywhere: in cars, television sets, routers, printers, audio equipment, mobile phones, tablets, settop boxes, media players and is the internet transfer backbone for thousands of software applications affecting billions of humans daily.

A little history: The name stands for “Client URL”, which was first released in 1997. The original author and lead developer is the Swedish developer Daniel Stenberg, who created cURL because he wanted to automate the fetching of currency exchange rates for IRC users.

Download a single file

curl http://path.to.the/file

Download a file and specify a new filename

curl http://example.com/file.zip -o new_file.zip

Download multiple files

curl -O URLOfFirstFile -O URLOfSecondFile

Download all sequentially numbered files (1-24)

curl http://example.com/pic[1-24].jpg

Download a file and pass HTTP Authentication

curl -u username:password URL

Download a file with a Proxy

curl -x proxysever.server.com:PORT http://addressiwantto.access

Download a file from FTP

curl -u username:password -O ftp://example.com/pub/file.zip

Get an FTP directory listing

curl ftp://username:password@example.com

Resume a previously failed download

curl -C - -o partial_file.zip http://example.com/file.zip

Fetch only the HTTP headers from a response

curl -I http://example.com

Fetch your external IP and network info as JSON

curl http://ifconfig.me/all/json

Limit the rate of a download

curl --limit-rate 1000B -O http://path.to.the/file

Get your global IP

curl httpbin.org/ip

Get only the HTTP status code

curl -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}\n' -s -I URL