Curl file download example

You can see that there are two rows in our download table that didn't download any data. These are the URLs that were redirected. We can review this redirect chain with:.

Don't have a Linux machine? If you'd like the file to have a different file name perhaps readme is too bossy for you , specify it after -O : curl -o dontreadme. Use cURL to download multiple files That's all well and good, but downloading lots of files in this way would quickly become a hassle. Get cURL to follow redirects As it's common for site admins to move the location of a file, then redirect to the new one, it can be good practice to include the -L option in your cURL command.

For example, if we try to access BitLaunch's robots. You can use the -o or --output option followed by a file name you want to save the output. If you want to download multiple files, you can add more -o or -O options:. 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.

In this example, after 10 attempts, cURL will throw an error and abort the download process. 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.

Downloading files off of the Internet can be dangerous, so be sure you are downloading from reputable sources. Out of the box, without any command-line arguments, the curl command will fetch a file and display its contents to the standard output. Fetching a file and display its contents is all well and good, but what if you want to actually save the file to your system? 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.