Learn How to Use the Curl Command in Linux

Introduction to Linux Curl Command

Linux curl command provides a powerful way for you to transfer data and files to and from a server via the command line. With curl, you can easily download and upload data from different sources, and view the output in a variety of formats. It is an essential tool for many developers and system administrators.

The curl command is a tool to transfer data from or to a server, using one of the supported protocols (HTTP, HTTPS, FTPS, GOPHER, DICT, TELNET, LDAP or FILE). The command is designed to work without user interaction. Curl supports FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, SCP, SFTP, TFTP, TELNET, DICT, LDAP, LDAPS, FILE, POP3, IMAP and SMTP.

How to Use the Linux Curl Command

Using the curl command is easy, you just need to specify the URL you want to access. You can also set options and configure other parameters like method, data, headers and authentication. Here is a basic example of how to use the curl command:

curl -X GET https://www.example.com

To use curl with a specific user-agent, you can provide it as an argument to the command:

curl -A "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/77.0.3865.120 Safari/537.36" -X GET https://www.example.com

To include additional custom headers in the request, you can use the -H or --header option:

curl -H "X-Custom-Header: Value" -X GET https://www.example.com

And of course, you can also use the curl command to download files from the server:

curl -O https://www.example.com/file.zip

Conclusion

The curl command is a powerful tool that is often used by developers and system administrators. It allows you to quickly and easily transfer data and files, and also view the output in a variety of formats. And with a few options, you can customize the requests to fit your needs.