cURL

Download Commands

Download files, resume interrupted transfers, and upload data with cURL. Learn efficient techniques for handling large files, multipart uploads, and FTP/SFTP transfers.

10 commands

Pro Tips

Use 'curl -C - -O url' to resume a broken download. The '-C -' flag auto-detects the offset.

Use 'curl -F "file=@photo.jpg" url' for multipart file uploads, just like an HTML form.

Limit download speed with '--limit-rate 1M' to avoid saturating your network.

Common Mistakes

Piping curl to shell ('curl url | sh') is dangerous — always inspect scripts before executing them.

Use '-L' to follow redirects when downloading. Many URLs redirect and without it you'll get an empty or HTML file.

Commands

Download file

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

Download file keeping original name

Limit download speed

$ curl --limit-rate 1M -O https://example.com/file.zip

Limit download speed to 1 MB/s

Download with progress bar

$ curl -# -O https://example.com/file.zip

Download showing progress bar

Download with custom name

$ curl -o custom-name.zip https://example.com/file.zip

Download file with custom filename

Resume download

$ curl -C - -O https://example.com/largefile.zip

Resume interrupted download

FTP download

$ curl -u user:pass ftp://ftp.example.com/file.txt -o file.txt

Download file from FTP server

Get HTTP status code

$ curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" https://example.com

Get only the HTTP status code

Measure response time

$ curl -w "\nTime: %{time_total}s\n" -o /dev/null -s https://example.com

Measure total response time

Upload file

$ curl -F "file=@/path/to/file.txt" https://api.example.com/upload

Upload file via multipart form

Upload with PUT

$ curl -T file.txt https://api.example.com/upload

Upload file using PUT method