Use the internet from the command line with curl
- June 11, 2020
- 0
Download our new curl cheat sheet. Curl is a fast and efficient way to pull the information you need from the internet without using a graphical interface.
Seth Kenlon
Curl is commonly considered a non-interactive web browser. That means it’s able to pull information from the internet and display it in your terminal or save it to a file. This literally what web browsers, such as Firefox or Chromium, do except there render the information ny default, while curl downloads and displays raw information. In reality, the curl command does much more and has the ability to transfer data to or from a server using one of many supported protocols, including HTTP, FTP, SFTP, IMAP, POP3, LDAP, SMB, SMTP, and many more. It’s a useful tool for the average terminal user, a vital convenience for the sysadmin, and a quality assurance tool for microservices and cloud developers.
Curl is designed to work without interaction, so unlike Firefox, you must think about your interaction with online data from start to finish. For instance, If you want to view a web page in Firefox, you launch a Firefox window. After Firefox is open, you type the website you want to visit into the URL field or a search engine. Then you navigate to the site and click on the page you want to see.
