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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

I personally use wget because you can download files without any extra flags.

Curl more equivalent to cat as a unix tool, making it easier to use in pipes. If your only use case is downloading then wget might look more practical

Yup. curl for when I want to see it, wget for when I want to save it. No shame.

Or `wget -S` when you want to save it AND see the headers.

alias wget="curl -sL -O --no-clobber"

Update: Based on comments from @xorcist and @stabbles:

alias wget="curl -fLsS --no-clobber --remote-name-all"

That will only download the first argument. You need

  --remote-name-all

instead of -O (--remote-name) to download all arguments files. It was in my opinion a mistake in the curl cli that remote-name works like output and needs to be repeated for each url. Remote-name-all is what rename-name should have been all along.

The curse of a non-breaking API...

Not the same... you need: `-S` to print error messages and `-f` to return exit code on non-200 responses.

Also, --no-clobber is very recent (v7.83), so unlikely to work in general.

So `curl -fLOsS ...`

Or just use wget ;)

The best thing about curl is that developer tools of browsers (firefox for example) have a convenient "Copy as curl" feature that mimics the web request. The reason there isn't a "Copy as wget" option, I think, is the level of control that curl allows so the request can be tailored to exactly mimic the browser.

But when you want to recursively download a website, of course, nothing better than wget. curl doesn't support that, and you'll need to parse and fetch the urls recursively yourself with a script.

You can paste that curl command into https://curlconverter.com/wget/ to turn it into a Wget command.

> The reason there isn't a "Copy as wget" option, I think, is the level of control that curl allows so the request can be tailored to exactly mimic the browser.

That's not true. You can read the code that generates the curl command, it's pretty straightforward:

https://github.com/ChromeDevTools/devtools-frontend/blob/c9a...

The arguments it uses are --url, --data-raw, -X/--request, -H/--header, --compressed and --insecure, all of which Wget has an analog of. I think the reason is that they don't care to do it and/or they don't want to make that "Copy" dropdown too long.

Copying from the web and pasting in a terminal, is that not a bad practice from a security viewpoint?

The command comes from a text field of the developer tools, which are provided by the browser vendor, not the websites.

It allows you to repeat a request that the browser did, but in your own terminal. It only downloads data, but doesn‘t run downloaded scripts.

Ok, I misread that.

    curl https://example/file >file

But what if you want to send an API request?

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