cURL 7.50.2 released | Hacker News Reader

cURL 7.50.2 released

curl.haxx.se

55 pointsokket16 comments

Every time I see a cURL update I always wonder why I use wget without a second thought, but cURL has so much more capabilities. If I need a more advance download cli program I then skip cURL and go to Aria2C which many times is just over kill. I need to force myself to use cURL more and not worry about how the syntax currently makes me feel.

Perhaps the default behavior changes things? In wget, you download a file, in curl you display it. If you just want to download it, it saves you typing.

My personal main usage of cURL is when reproducing requests made by a browser - using something like Chromium's F12 or Firebug, clicking on the "Network" tab and in the context menu for a request clicking "Copy as cURL". Invaluable.

-O is one of few curl options I've memorised. It downloads to a file named the same as the source.

I have to say, I love that default behaviour. Too many newer command line programms need some obscure option to make them write to stdout. Some let you replace the filename with a dash but too many of them don't follow that standard, so that I still have to open the manpage to get them to do what really should be the default behaviour. And it's perfect for my usecase, which mostly involves piping the result into other command line utilities like sed or grep in shell scripts.

If any program doesn't use - to let you write to stdout, just use /dev/stdout. It's usually going to work unless there's a check whether it's a regular file or unless program tries to seek (e.g. compression programs).

>Perhaps the default behavior changes things? In wget, you download a file, in curl you display it. If you just want to download it, it saves you typing.

This. If you want to wean yourself off of wget, perhaps aliasing wget to `curl -O` will help. It helped me :)

I do the same for downloads and I don't care anymore. It's my default and whatever extra features curl has, I don't need them apart from very specific circumstances. (mostly testing APIs) Why force yourself to use curl if there are no benefits in the most common case?

I almost never actually use wget...I have an alias set in my bash config that translates `wget` to `curl -O`.

I'm not entirely sure why I do that, actually...I think I was trying to impress someone by how few dependencies I had like four years ago and it stuck.

...and which of the improvements should actually draw my attention?

Re downvoting: I wasn't being sarcastic here - it's just that without context, this is just a bugfix release, with no note on which are the big features here. We could as well put every single Linux git commit here, couldn't we?

I see two factors why every cURL release is more popular than Linux releases:

a) Most people get their Linux fix through distributions, nobody [1] is compiling their own kernel any more. So knowing about a Linux release is mostly for curiosity sake, what can be used in x months/years.

b) cURL is also extremely widely used [2], so every release matters and can easily compiled/installed directly, without waiting for distributions to catch on.

[1] exceptions prove the rule

[2] even Microsoft added an 'curl' alias for accessing URLs via HTTP in their PowerShell

:re [2] - wonder what happened with that with all of the back and forth on that GitHub Issue.

"exceptions prove the rule" usage is usually misunderstanding.

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

Bah! That's a digression, the intended meaning here is clear.

Though let me say it is an interesting digression :D It seems that the use of that saying here qualifies for the "Loose rhetorical sense" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule...) described in that article. The one we would really like to avoid would be "Serious nonsense": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule...

Yay, I'm very happy about CURLOPT_TCP_NODELAY being default!

More info here: https://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/CURLOPT_TCP_NODELAY.html

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