CURL
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- This article is about the cURL command line tool. There is also an unrelated Curl programming language and the mathematical term Curl.
CURL is a command line tool for transferring files with URL syntax, supporting FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, Telnet, DICT, FILE and LDAP. CURL supports HTTPS certificates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading, Kerberos, HTTP form based upload, proxies, cookies, user+password authentication (Basic, Digest, NTLM and Negotiate for HTTP and kerberos4 for FTP), file transfer resume, http proxy tunneling and many other features. CURL is open source/free software distributed under MIT License.
The main purpose and use for curl the command line tool is to automate unattended transfers or sequences of operations. It is for example a good tool for simulating web browser usage.
Libcurl is the corresponding library/API that is intended to be incorporated into users' programs. You may think of cURL as a stand-alone executable made out of the libcurl library. libcurl is being used to provide URL transfer capabilities to numerous applications, Open Source as well as many commercial ones.
There are more than 30 different bindings available for libcurl, making it available to just about every programming languange and environment an ordinary user can think of!