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Comment by Xophmeister | Hacker News Reader

Streaming to stdout is more Unix-y, allowing you to pipe the response into further processes. For example:

    curl http://api.example.com/json | jq '.["someKey"]' # etc., etc.

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Or in modern idiomatically insecure install scripts:

    curl http://bogus.example.com/install | sudo bash

Too bad that is a reserved domain. Would be hilarious to put an actual shell script there that would echo ARF ARF ARF in a loop.

It may be more unix-y, but it's less user-friendly if the expectation is to just download a file.

EDIT: Wow, surprised by the downvotes. I don't think I said anything controversial (y'know principle of least surprise and all), but maybe I was being a bit too opaque: wget, by virtue of being the first on the scene, built an expectation that $THING_THAT_GETS_URLS would result in a file without any other input/arguments. Curl, to this day, surprises me because I was around when wget was all you had.

Remove your edit, it makes it more likely for you to get downvotes, not less.

If you post something, stand by it, do not worry about downvotes. I don't really like them, but nevertheless I'm proud when I get a downvote - it means I don't have a hive-mind mentality.

Nah, I don't really mind the downvotes per se. I was just surprised, that's all. Anyway, seems that my further clarification in the edit cleared up some confusion on the content of my post, so it's all good.

Nonsense. You can use both tools. 'curl' is 'cat url', and by default is meant to behave like 'cat' - that is, send stuff to STDOUT. 'wget' is 'web get', and gets an object from (only) the web or ftp, and plonks it on your filesystem. They both do exactly what they're supposed to (according to name), by default.

> 'curl' is 'cat url',

Whoa... TIL something! I don't know if that's the official etymology, but that's a great mnemonic!

EDIT: ... and yes, I use both tools :).

Well, it looks like I was taught wrong, and it's not 'cat URL' (though that's a good way to think of it), but the rather more direct-to-STDOUT-sounding 'see URL'. TIL something too :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CURL

My first impression is 'cat URL' not 'see URL'. The wikipedia article does not have to be official.

One nice thing about saving a file vs piping is that wget sets the timestamp on the file based on the remote HTTP headers.

curl -o does not.

curl -Ro does, however.

Fair enough. Perhaps I just need to adjust my expectations.

Or maybe there's a good reason for having two tools :)

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