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curl is used in the command line or in scripts to transfer data. It is also used nearly everywhere: in cars, television sets, routers, printers, audio equipment, mobile phones, tablets, settop boxes, media players and is the internet transfer backbone for thousands of software applications affecting billions of humans daily.
A little history: The name stands for “Client URL”, which was first released in 1997. The original author and lead developer is the Swedish developer Daniel Stenberg, who created cURL because he wanted to automate the fetching of currency exchange rates for IRC users.
Download a single file
curl http://path.to.the/file
Download a file and specify a new filename
curl http://example.com/file.zip -o new_file.zip
Download multiple files
curl -O URLOfFirstFile -O URLOfSecondFile
Download all sequentially numbered files (1-24)
curl http://example.com/pic[1-24].jpg
Download a file and pass HTTP Authentication
curl -u username:password URL
Download a file with a Proxy
curl -x proxysever.server.com:PORT http://addressiwantto.access
Download a file from FTP
curl -u username:password -O ftp://example.com/pub/file.zip
Get an FTP directory listing
curl ftp://username:password@example.com
curl -C - -o partial_file.zip http://example.com/file.zip
Fetch only the HTTP headers from a response
curl -I http://example.com
Fetch your external IP and network info as JSON
curl http://ifconfig.me/all/json
Limit the rate of a download
curl --limit-rate 1000B -O http://path.to.the/file
Get your global IP
curl httpbin.org/ip
Get only the HTTP status code
curl -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}\n' -s -I URL
