Filed under: Features, UNIX / BSD, TUAW Tips
Monday man page: curl
Today's man page covers one of my favorite utilities: curl. No, it's not a haircare product -- it's one of the most flexible download tools in the kit bag, with the ability to handle almost any protocol that can be addressed via a URL (hence the name, short for "client for URLs"). If there's a server out there that's reachable via HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SFTP, SCP, and lots of other alphabet soup, curl can talk to it.
curl http://www.tuaw.com/2007/03/05/monday-man-page-curl/ -- display the source of this very article in Terminalcurl ftp://ftp.panic.com -- list the contents of a remote FTP site, in this case one with a pretty good FTP clientcurl -o ~/Desktop/curl-man.html http://curl.haxx.se/docs/manpage.html -- copy the curl manpage to your desktop; if you use capital -O, the local file mirrors the remote filenamecurl has an excellent usage manual at its site, detailing examples of use and advanced techniques. While there are zillions of ways to use curl in site testing, analysis and uploading, my favorite way of using it is as a quick file downloader. Read on for the details.
Just a quick hint for today's man page: the open command does just what you might think. It opens files, directories, applications or URLs; no muss, no fuss. For files, you can specify an application to open them with the -a flag (or just trust LaunchServices to pick the right app). If you want to, the -e flag will force them to open in TextEdit.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
