Programming Tutorials

curl in Mac OS X

By: Strauss K in macos Tutorials on 2011-02-03  

curl is a command-line tool in Mac OS X and other Unix-based operating systems that allows you to transfer data to or from a server using various protocols such as HTTP, FTP, SMTP, etc. It can be used to download files, send requests to web servers, and perform other network-related tasks.

To use curl in Mac OS X, open the Terminal application and enter the curl command followed by the URL or path to the file you want to download or the web server you want to send requests to.

Here are some common options you can use with the curl command:

• -O or --remote-name: Downloads the file from the specified URL and saves it with the same name as the remote file.

• -L or --location: Follows HTTP redirects to the final destination of a URL.

• -u or --user: Specifies the username and password for HTTP authentication.

• -d or --data: Sends data as the body of an HTTP POST request.

• -H or --header: Specifies an HTTP header to be sent with the request.

For example, to download a file using curl, you can enter the following command in the Terminal:

curl -O https://example.com/file.txt

This will download the file file.txt from the website example.com and save it in the current working directory.

To send a GET request to a web server using curl, you can enter the following command:

curl https://example.com

This will send a GET request to the URL https://example.com and display the server's response in the Terminal.

For more information on how to use curl and its various options, you can refer to the manual page by running the following command in the Terminal:

man curl