• curbstickle@anarchist.nexusEnglish
    13·
    18 days ago

    curl stands for client URL, and you use it to talk to a server (URL) in whatever protocol you specify. Its used for development as a way to test client & server communication, built into applications to perform communication between a client & a server, and its used often because its extremely portable, has great error logging, can be rate limited, and can provide a substantial amount of detail about the communication.

      • curbstickle@anarchist.nexusEnglish
        2·
        18 days ago

        Yes, though really its a lot of servers.

        I wouldn’t worry about tools yet, I’d recommend getting a book/wiki on networking if you’d like to learn, its knowledge that builds.

  • Björn@swg-empire.de
    7·
    18 days ago

    It’s a program to download stuff from the web. It is very flexible. You can tell it to use cookies, post form data, upload and download files. It can do basically everything a web browser does without a graphical user interface.

    It is built into many software pieces. And developers love it to test stuff.

    • TheracAriane@thebrainbin.orgOP
      2·
      18 days ago

      @bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de exactly… I wish to avoid browsers and GUIs as far as I can… So this tickled my curiosity…

      • asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev
        11·
        18 days ago

        Believe me, you aren’t going to get used to nor enjoy “browsing” the web with curl. It’s not what you think it is.

          • 48954246@lemmy.worldEnglish
            6·
            18 days ago

            The modern internet isn’t designed to be interacted with via a terminal.

            So much of the internet today runs on JavaScript and curl won’t run that

          • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
            10·
            18 days ago

            For that I would rather recommend a terminal browser like lynx, w3m or links2 in example. curl is more like a single web request to download one piece of raw file (an html page or an image in example). It is not meant to interpret websites and display results. If you want save webpages for offline view, then something like wget.

  • dajoho@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    18 days ago

    Curl is very low level. It will let you download things but won’t display it to you in any really useful way. It is intended to be used by other applications.

    If you’re looking to use it to browse websites using the terminal, you need something that uses curl in the background but displays anything you download to you in a sensible way. Two such applications are lynx and links2. These will run in your terminal.

    However you may not have much fun browsing facebook or anything modern. A lot of websites require javascript, which lynx or links2 will have trouble understanding.

  • CarrotsHaveEars@lemmy.ml
    4·
    18 days ago

    command line tool and library for transferring data with URLs (since 1998)

    Have you even tried to open the very link you posted and read the first line???