Let’s cURL in Cyberspace

You may not find this funny. But my lame and dry sense of humor actually finds the title hilarious. As funny as it is, we are not curling in the gym we are using a well known command today called: cURL.

The command cURL stands for - client URL. In case you’re weird like me and need to know what URL stands for it means - uniform resource locator.

cURL allows us to transfer data from a server using different kinds of protocols such as http, https, ftp, sftp and more. That being said you can also send data using cURL as well so it is a great tool to sit and become familiar with.

Now that I have introduced the command and tool along with what it does, lets dive into some of the most useful commands available to you.

If you curl a website with no switches:

curl google.com

• you can receive simple information, is the site still up? Is it redirected?

curl -v google.com

• this command will provide you with much more information such as the headers, body of the document and IPv4 and IPv6 information.

curl -vvv google.com

• this essentially does everything the above command does but now you can get the response info back from the server you are communicating with.

curl -O google.com

• this I find to be one of the most useful commands. You can use it to download the file at the specified path you have set.

curl -d google.com

• this command allows you to post data with the curl command. This can be username/password, json data and more.

Lastly, always check the “-h” or “—help” options or man pages if possible. This wasn’t meant to teach absolutely everything but just scratch the surface. If you’re interested there are tons of books and online resources too keep learning about the topic.

Unfortunately, I am not sure how to post photo on the regular blogs on the site so bear with me. If I figure it out I’ll update with screenshots so it is much more enjoyable of a read.