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Comment by reacharavindh | Hacker News Reader

Did not know much about curl until I saw this. I have seen a few curl something.sh | sh instructions online that I always skip and wget the script for inspection. I guess it took a prestigious swedish award to the author to add it to my afternoon reading :-)

Judging from the respect in all the comments, it looks like a very well deserved honour. Congratulations and thanks for your work! I will appreciate even more after my reading.

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From my experience both wget and curl deserve respect. Both are fantastic tools, similar in some ways but covering much ground in other directions. I find wget ideal as a spider (checking broken linnks, making local backups of webpages and similar) while curl is much easier to use for quick inspection of web pages (including headers and https certificates).

Congratulations to author for the prize! And NZ is a great destination, hope they enjoy it. :)

And i think that is exactly how they differ.

Wget is first and foremost aimed at being a file downloader/spider. If used with no switches it will grab the first file behind the url and save it locally.

Curl on the other hand it more of a HTTP client lib with a cli interface. Unless fed a specific switch, it will send the file behind the url to stdout. Meaning that it is more at home at one end of a pipe.

> I have seen a few curl something.sh | sh instructions online that I always skip and wget the script for inspection.

That's the `| sh` that you don't like though, not the `curl something.sh`...

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