The Linux curl
command can do a whole lot more than download files. Find out what curl
is capable of, and when you should use it instead of wget
.
curl
vs. wget
: What’s the Difference?
People often struggle to identify the relative strengths of the wget
and curl
commands. The commands do have some functional overlap. They can each retrieve files from remote locations, but that’s where the similarity ends.
wget
is a fantastic tool for downloading content and files. It can download files, web pages, and directories. It contains intelligent routines to traverse links in web pages and recursively download content across an entire website. It is unsurpassed as a command-line download manager.
curl
satisfies an altogether different need. Yes, it can retrieve files, but it cannot recursively navigate a website looking for content to retrieve. What curl
actually does is let you interact with remote systems by making requests to those systems, and retrieving and displaying their responses to you. Those responses might well be web page content and files, but they can also contain data provided via a web service or API as a result of the “question” asked by the curl request.
And curl
isn’t limited to websites. curl
supports over 20 protocols, including HTTP, HTTPS, SCP, SFTP, and FTP. And arguably, due to its superior handling of Linux pipes, curl
can be more easily integrated with other commands and scripts.
The author of curl
has a webpage that describes the differences he sees between curl
and wget
.
Installing curl
Out of the computers used to research this article, Fedora 31 and Manjaro 18.1.0 had curl
already installed. curl
had to be installed on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. On Ubuntu, run this command to install it:
sudo apt-get install curl
The curl Version
The --version
option makes curl
report its version. It also lists all the protocols that it supports.
curl --version
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