Comments on: Beginner-to-Beginner: FTP via curl

By: yannito

yannito — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 13:31:30 +0000

hi jaya
you can send some command with curl to the remote ftp
for delete test with this
curl -Q “dele ” filetodeletonthe remote

By: jaya

jaya — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 05:53:16 +0000

hi all,
I am using curl for web-server application and I am at client side. I
want to delete file and upload new file using curl command. I tried
uploading file like this

curl -T hi.c http://username:password@192.1.....63.1.90/

and i got it.

But how to do delete a file using curl command ? please anyone knows
about
this ? give me solution

I want it for http server.
please help me out.

By: Jay

Jay — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:33:22 +0000

everyone talks about uploading a file can someone give the commands for downloading a file using curl from an ftp server.

By: davidw

davidw — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 23:10:46 +0000

Jason, I changed the line about how to check if you have curl to reflect your comment. Thanks!

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 20:45:18 +0000

When checking to see if curl is installed and in your path, you may want to recommend the command
curl -V

With the capital V option, curl will display it’s version information instead of the “error” it displays when run with no options.

Also, you explain that an executable file is runnable, but you don’t explain how to open the terminal (you’ll find it in Applications->Utilities) or how to change directories (cd /your/directory/path/). Just thought that might be valuable to some people who want to try this.

Finally, as a little background, “cURL is a command line tool for transferring files with URL syntax, supporting FTP, … HTTP, HTTPS, … [and] SFTP…” (Wikipedia article on cURL)

As Brent explains above, the curl application can be used to simulate a series of actions, such as rebooting a home wireless router that uses a web interface to control it.

You could also use the curl application to automate other types of work. For instance, let’s say you wanted to keep track of which candidate had the most Google results for their name. You might create a script that uses curl to submit the candidates names to Google one by one, and then saves the results page to your hard drive. You could automate the running of that script using an iCal alarm, or a cron job for more advanced users. After some time goes by, you could then tabulate the results. Because you’re automating your data collection, why stop with just Google? You could also collect the results from other search engines too!

The world of automation is a fantastic place, and OS X comes with a variety of tools right out of the box that let you be very effective. Thanks for this post David. You might also want to check out some basic Apple Scripts, or even the Automator tool (Applications->Automator).

By: Brent Ashley

Brent Ashley — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 19:44:03 +0000

I use curl extensively, for instance to automate gathering of networked device configurations through their web interface.
By using its cookie-saving features, you can use curl to automatically navigate into web apps that require login.

If you use the option “-c cookies.txt”, a file containing the cookies used in the transaction will be saved as cookies.txt.

If you use “-b cookies.txt” in subsequent calls, the cookies will continue to be be read and written during those transactions.

That is to say, if you were to want to press the reboot button on a home router from a script, it might look something like this:

#!/bin/sh
# script to reboot fictitious router.

# submit login form
curl \
-sc cookies.txt \
http://192.168.1.1/Login \
-d “username=admin” \
-d “password=secret” \
-d “submit=Login”

# press reboot button on admin page
# this would fail if we didn’t have the cookie
# we saved from the login
curl \
-sb cookies.txt \
http://192.168.1.1/Admin \
-d submit=Reboot