Download from file curl

You can check on things with the cat command:. Execute the following command to download the remote robots. Now use the cat command to display the contents of do-bots.

If you happened to try to fetch the robots. You can verify this by using the -I flag, which displays the request headers rather than the contents of the file:. The output shows that the URL was redirected. The first line of the output tells you that it was moved, and the Location line tells you where:.

You could use curl to make another request manually, or you can use the --location or -L argument which tells curl to redo the request to the new location whenever it encounters a redirect.

Give it a try:. You can combine the -L argument with some of the aforementioned arguments to download the file to your local system:. Warning : Many resources online will ask you to use curl to download scripts and execute them. If you remember the Basics of the Unix Philosophy , one of the tenets is:.

In the example of curl , the author apparently believes that it's important to tell the user the progress of the download. For a very small file, that status display is not terribly helpful. Let's try it with a bigger file this is the baby names file from the Social Security Administration to see how the progress indicator animates:.

Quick note: If you're new to the command-line, you're probably used to commands executing every time you hit Enter. In this case, the command is so long because of the URL that I broke it down into two lines with the use of the backslash , i.

This is solely to make it easier for you to read. As far as the computer cares, it just joins the two lines together as if that backslash weren't there and runs it as one command. The curl progress indicator is a nice affordance, but let's just see if we get curl to act like all of our Unix tools. In curl 's documentation of options , there is an option for silence:.

Silent or quiet mode. Don't show progress meter or error messages. Makes Curl mute. So those are the basics for the curl command. There are many, many more options, but for now, we know how to use curl to do something that is actually quite powerful: fetch a file, anywhere on the Internet, from the simple confines of our command-line.

Before we go further, though, let's look at the various ways this simple command can be re-written and, more crucially, screwed up:. If the target server responded with the HTTP redirection code 3xx for the requested file, the local file you downloaded would be empty.

In this case, you have to add the -L or --location option to tell cURL to follow the redirects. The number of bytes can be abbreviated by appending a suffix: kilobytes k or K , megabytes m or M , and gigabytes g or G.

Do not! If you do not know the exact value of the offset, do not worry, you just need to specify -C - to tell cURL to automatically find out that value.