The shell may try to interpret some of the byte values in the binary file as control characters or escape sequences. If the file it is retrieving is a binary file, the outcome can be unpredictable. curl īut its default action is to dump it to the terminal window as source code.īeware: If you don’t tell curl you want something stored as a file, it will always dump it to the terminal window. If we point curl at a web page, it will retrieve it for us. It also lists all the protocols that it supports. The -version option makes curlreport its version.
How to install curl on a mac install#
On Ubuntu, run this command to install it: sudo apt-get install curl curl had to be installed on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Out of the computers used to research this article, Fedora 31 and Manjaro 18.1.0 had curl already installed. The author of curl has a webpage that describes the differences he sees between curl and wget. And arguably, due to its superior handling of Linux pipes, curl can be more easily integrated with other commands and scripts. curl supports over 20 protocols, including HTTP, HTTPS, SCP, SFTP, and FTP. Those responses might well be web page content and files, but they can also contain data provided via a web service or API as a result of the “question” asked by the curl request.Īnd curl isn’t limited to websites. What curl actually does is let you interact with remote systems by making requests to those systems, and retrieving and displaying their responses to you. Yes, it can retrieve files, but it cannot recursively navigate a website looking for content to retrieve. wget -no-verbose turns off log messag\es but displays error messages.Curl satisfies an altogether different need.wget -v explicitly enables wget’s default of verbose output.wget -q turns off all of wget’s output, including error messages.wget -o path/to/log.txt enables logging output to the specified directory instead of displaying the log-in standard output.You can also consider the following flags as a partial way to control the output you receive when using wget.
How to install curl on a mac download#
Wget can do more than control the download process, as you can also create logs for future reference. wget -t 10 will try to download the resource up to 10 times before failing.wget -c/ wget -continue will continue downloads of partially downloaded files.wget -nc/ wget -no-clobber will not overwrite files that already exist in the destination.This input file must be in HTML format, or you’ll need to use the -force-html flag to parse the HTML. wget -i file specifies target URLs from an input file.This would skip all files with the PNG extension. The asterisk (*) is a wildcard, such as “*.png”. In this case, it will exclude all the index files. wget -R index.html/ wget -reject index.html will skip any files matching the specified file name.For example, -nH -cut-dirs=1 would change the specified path of “/pub/xemacs/” into simply “/xemacs/” and reduce the number of empty parent directories in the local download. wget -cut-dirs=# skips the specified number of directories down the URL before starting to download files.For example, wget would skip the folder in the previous example and start with the History directory instead. In other words, it skips over the primary domain name. wget -nH removes the “hostname” directories.wget -X /absolute/path/to/directory will exclude a specific directory on the remote server.There are many flags to help you set up the download process. Let’s take a look at two areas in our focus on controlling the download process and creating logs. This is great if you have specific requirements for your download. You’ll find that wget is a flexible tool, as it uses a number of other additional flags. In general, it’s a good idea to disable robots.txt to prevent abridged downloads. This ignores restrictions in the robots.txt file.