Date created: 2025-02-14

Go wild here

Typically you can use curl to download a file by simply doing

$ curl -o thingy.txt 'https://example.com/text.txt'

This would download it as thingy.txt.

But if you want to keep the original name you can use

$ curl -O 'https://example.com/text.txt'

Urls without a filename in them

If there's no file name attached to the url, you can use the file header as the file name.

$ curl -O -J 'https://example.com/text.txt'

Following redirects

Sometimes a download will silently fail by downloading 0 bytes. An example is downloading from github releases. This can be solved by using the -L flag, which means "follow redirects".

$ curl -JLO 'https://github.com/text.txt'

-O, --remote-name          Write output to a file named as the remote file  
-J, --remote-header-name   Use the header-provided filename
-L, --location             Follow redirects

Note

Wrapping the url in quotes is recommended to avoid problematic symbols like &.