Download file with curl

If you happened to try to fetch the robots. You can verify this by using the -I flag, which displays the request headers rather than the contents of the file:. The output shows that the URL was redirected. The first line of the output tells you that it was moved, and the Location line tells you where:. You could use curl to make another request manually, or you can use the --location or -L argument which tells curl to redo the request to the new location whenever it encounters a redirect.

Give it a try:. You can combine the -L argument with some of the aforementioned arguments to download the file to your local system:.

Warning : Many resources online will ask you to use curl to download scripts and execute them. You can use the -o or --output option followed by a file name you want to save the output.

If you want to download multiple files, you can add more -o or -O options:. If the target server responded with the HTTP redirection code 3xx for the requested file, the local file you downloaded would be empty. You can see that there are two rows in our download table that didn't download any data. These are the URLs that were redirected. We can review this redirect chain with:. Don't have a Linux machine?

If you'd like the file to have a different file name perhaps readme is too bossy for you , specify it after -O : curl -o dontreadme.

Use cURL to download multiple files That's all well and good, but downloading lots of files in this way would quickly become a hassle. As you might have noticed in the --silent documentation, it lists the alternative form of -s. Many options for many tools have a shortened alias. In fact, --output can be shortened to -o.

Now watch out: the number of hyphens is not something you can mess up on; the following commands would cause an error or other unexpected behavior:.

Also, mind the position of my. The argument must follow after the -o …because curl. How would curl know that my. In fact, you might see that you've created a file named -s …which is not the end of the world, but not something you want to happen unwittingly. By and large from what I can think of at the top of my head , the order of the options doesn't matter:. That's because the -s option doesn't take an argument.

But try the following:. The last thing to consider is what happens when you just curl for a URL with no options which, after all, should be optional.