Download a file using curl in linux

By default, curl is already installed on most Linux systems. However, if it is not present on your system, you can install it using the following command. If for some reason, your download was interrupted, then you can resume file download with the -C command. By default, curl does not download a file from a URL which gets redirected.

You can do so using -L option. If you have these URLs stored in a file e. Make sure you list 1 URL on each line of the file. Here is the command to download a list of URLs. We also use xargs command along with curl for this purpose. Sometimes the file you want to download may be password protected. Here is the command to download a password protected file.

If you want to limit the download speed of your files, you can do so with the —limit-rate option. By submitting your email, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. 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.

People often struggle to identify the relative strengths of the wget and curl commands. The commands do have some functional overlap. 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.

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.

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.

Out of the computers used to research this article, Fedora 31 and Manjaro On Ubuntu, run this command to install it:. The --version option makes curl report its version. It also lists all the protocols that it supports. If the file it is retrieving is a binary file, the outcome can be unpredictable. The shell may try to interpret some of the byte values in the binary file as control characters or escape sequences. Because there is no terminal window output to display, curl outputs a set of progress information.

In this example, curl detects that the output is being redirected to a file and that it is safe to generate the progress information. Double-clicking that file will open your default browser so that it displays the retrieved web page. Note that the address in the browser address bar is a local file on this computer, not a remote website. We can create a file by using the -o output option, and telling curl to create the file.

To have the text-based download information replaced by a simple progress bar, use the - progress bar option.

It is easy to restart a download that has been terminated or interrupted. To restart the download, use the -C continue at option. This causes curl to restart the download at a specified point or offset within the target file. If you use a hyphen - as the offset, curl will look at the already downloaded portion of the file and determine the correct offset to use for itself.

Using xargs we can download multiple URLs at once. Perhaps we want to download a series of web pages that make up a single article or tutorial. This is the command we need to use to have xargs pass these URLs to curl one at a time:. The -n 1 option tells xargs to treat each line of the text file as a single parameter. Checking in the file browser shows the multiple files have been downloaded. Each one bears the name it had on the remote server. Using curl with a File Transfer Protocol FTP server is easy, even if you have to authenticate with a username and password.

This is a free-for-testing FTP server hosted by Rebex. Use the same command as a moment ago, with the filename appended to it:. In almost all cases, it is going to be more convenient to have the retrieved file saved to disk for us, rather than displayed in the terminal window. Once more we can use the -O remote file output command to have the file saved to disk, with the same filename that it has on the remote server.

The file is retrieved and saved to disk. We can use ls to check the file details. It has the same name as the file on the FTP server, and it is the same length, bytes. Some remote servers will accept parameters in requests that are sent to them.

The parameters might be used to format the returned data, for example, or they may be used to select the exact data that the user wishes to retrieve. It is often possible to interact with web application programming interfaces APIs using curl. As a simple example, the ipify website has an API can be queried to ascertain your external IP address. It returns a JSON object describing a book.

You can find these on the back cover of most books, usually below a barcode. Especially if the protocol was one of the many not supported by wget. Browse All iPhone Articles Browse All Mac Articles Do I need one? Browse All Android Articles Browse All Smart Home Articles Customize the Taskbar in Windows