Curl downloads html instead of file

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Exploding turkeys and how not to thaw your frozen bird: Top turkey questions Featured on Meta. Now live: A fully responsive profile. Reducing the weight of our footer. Linked Related 1. Hot Network Questions. 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 Now use the cat command to display the contents of do-bots.

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 learn more by viewing the manual page for curl by running man curl. Where would you like to share this to?