#               Curl Cheatsheet 

By [coinvest](https://paragraph.com/@coinvest) · 2023-09-19

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[**curl**](https://curl.haxx.se/) 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`

Resume a previously failed download

`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`

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*Originally published on [coinvest](https://paragraph.com/@coinvest/curl-cheatsheet)*