Curl is 18 years old tomorrow | Hacker News Reader

Curl is 18 years old tomorrow

daniel.haxx.se

149 pointsdonohoe30 comments

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/03/19/curl-is-18-years-old-... is a much more appropriate link

Site seems to be down now, but I wonder if dang will change the article link, seeing as it's technically a completely different article.

https://archive.is/atV0P if the site responds before archive.is times out.

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:... otherwise.

We changed it. Submitted URL was https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2015/03/20/curl-17-years-old-tod....

Or 18 years old today (2016)

I was unsure whether to have that as headline or not. Odd situation

Old enough to drink alcohol. :-)

Not in the US.

Not in Afghanistan either. Is it really that important to point out?

Well yeah. Lots of people on HN from America. Very very few live in Afghanistan.

Old enough to go to war, then :)

Depends on the state and circumstance.

(Many states have parental permission exceptions, some extending to restaurants)

But none of those (that I know of anyway) specify you have to be 18; the exception is some combination of parental consent, private location, medical or religious reasons, etc.

That's the point. You can't purchase alcohol in the US prior to being 21, but there are lots of situations where consumption by someone under 21 is allowed.

I've seen people proposing that allowing children to consume alcohol with their parents permission would help with the binge drinking culture, but that's already legal in 35 states[1]. So I posted my (slightly pedantic) earlier comment out of a belief that this is something that is not widely understood.

[1] http://drinkingage.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=0...

As a tangent, I've found httpie to be a decent curl replacement for many uses.

https://github.com/jkbrzt/httpie

They should have named it Shemp, although in an alternate universe, Hackett might have been a good replacement too. [1]

I for one always pronounce WWW "woo woo woo"! [2]

>Moe asked older brother Shemp to take Curly's place, but Shemp was hesitant to rejoin the Stooges as he was enjoying a successful solo career. He realized, however, that not rejoining the Stooges would mean the end of Moe's and Larry's film careers. Shemp wanted assurance that rejoining them would be only temporary, and that he could leave the Stooges once Curly recovered. However, Curly's health continued to deteriorate, and it became clear that he couldn't return. The Stooges turned to comedian Buddy Hackett as a replacement, but Hackett declined, and Shemp remained a Stooge. Curly remained ill until his death of a cerebral hemorrhage from additional strokes on January 18, 1952.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Stooges#Shemp.27s_re...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyGWEcqY96E

Excellent!

interesting alternative if you have a decent python version! However I need to say that Python+request lib has historically bugs (which are resolved in newer python 2.7.9+ versions). For example I had problems with SSL SNI certificates with older python versions and CURL and WGET don't have this problems on older Linux distributions. Last year I also had a lot of headache because of this in Ansible (Python + request lib based): https://github.com/ansible/ansible-modules-core/issues/1716#... So I bet more on curl than python+request lib

Good point. Same problem with old versions of Java.

I had problems with Voxeo's Java IVR web service calling back to my https server using SNI, since they were apparently using some old Java http client libraries [1], or not using the new ones correctly.

I had the darnedest time figuring out what was going wrong, and when I finally did, they weren't responsive to the suggestion they upgrade their library and fix their code to support SNI, so I had to punch an insecure hole for them to call back through.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12361090/server-name-indi...

pip install requests[security] and you don't have to care whether the stdlib properly supports SNI.

I wish there was a curl to httpie converter or it did that for you natively

There's an issue on GitHub for this: https://github.com/jkbrzt/httpie/issues/325

// author here

What do you mean exactly?

a billion users sounds like too many to be true

I think these are indirect users. If your Android phone uses curl to download updates or something similar, then the phone owner is a user.

Maybe if you count computers.

a billion users? 14% of the world population??

curl is cool but I've always preferred wget.

wget is cool, but I've always preferred curl.

Oh boy oh boy, this conversation is productive!

The thing I like about wget is that I can download with 'wget <url>' and it usually just works. With curl I need to type the file name in again and pipe the output.

That sounds like "curl -O $URL" which writes to the current directory using the basename of $URL.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com