Some notes on cURL

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Little powerful command-line tool by Daniel Stenberg for transferring data between computers in networks using various protocols such as http, https or ftp.

As i keep on forgetting boring things pretty fast, i will post some more or less useful cURL commands on this page just for myself. And for anyone else, as long as he or she might be as dumb as i am. You can do a lot more with cURL than described here: Proxies, Tunneling, SSL, Fileuploading. Please refer to the official docs or the man pages for complete options.

BASIC HTTP CALL

do a simple http call on index of example.com

curl http://www.example.com

be silent...

curl -s http://www.example.com

add some Port... yawn...

curl http://www.example.com:85/

include Header Output

curl --include http://www.example.com:85/

Verbose Mode

curl --verbose http://www.example.com

DICT

Get the definition of the word SOLARIS. For in-depth understanding of the DICT-Protocol, have a look at Wikipedia DICT and for more detailled informations refer to RFC2229

curl dict://dict.org/d:solaris

Insecure HTTPS

curl -k https://spielprinzip.com

Save OUTPUT in File

with flag -o you are able to save the output to a file on a disk

curl -o saveHere.html http://spielprinzip.com

with flag --create-dirs cURL will even handle to create the local dir hierachy for you

curl -o path/to/some/not/existing/dir/saveHere.html --create-dirs http://spielprinzip.com

Get some FTP File

curl ftp://user:pass@spielprinzip.com:21/coolfile.txt

Send a FTP NLSD command

list a directory on a FTP server

curl -l -u user:name ftp://spielprinzip.com:519

Upload some FTP File

curl -T /path/to/a/file -u user:pass ftp://spielprinzip.com:21

Send some Headers

curl --header "Connection:keep-alive" "--header "User-Agent: Warrior 01" http://example.com/someXML.xml

Send some custom Headers

curl --header "Secret:15412415" "--header "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:5.0.1)" http://example.com/someXML.xml

GET some data

curl http://example.com?p=3&ut=helo

POST some data

curl --data "p=4&ut=helo" http://www.example.com/someDir/
curl --data "Information" http://www.example.com/someDir/

Pass HTACCESS

curl --user name:pass http://www.example.com
curl -u name:pass http://spielprinzip.com/secret-page/
curl http://name:pass@protected.example.com

Fake HTTP Referer

By the way, in RFC2068, the word Referrer is wrongly written as Referer [sic] and therefor now standard in the HTTP-Specification! This mistake was not adepted to the DOM Specifications. So this may explain the different notation.

curl --referer http://www.example.come http://www.example.com

FOLLOW LOCATION

When the server is sending in a redirect header (301, 302), cURL will follow

curl --location http://www.example.com

Send Cookies

For advanced Hacking, you often need to send some cookies. This one here is the simple method.
Dig the web for more detailed informations about cookie handling with cURL

curl --cookie "name=Jack" http://www.example.com