How to Install and Use Curl on Ubuntu 20.04
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curl is a command-line utility for transferring data from or to a remote server. With
curl, you can download or upload data using one of the supported protocols, including HTTP, HTTPS, SCP
, and FTP
This article explains how to install Curl on Ubuntu 20.04.
Installing Curl on Ubuntu
If you get an error message saying
curl command not found when trying to download a file with
curl, it means that the
curl package is not installed on your Ubuntu machine.
curl is included in the default Ubuntu 20.04 repositories. The installation is pretty straightforward:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install curl
Once the installation is complete, verify it by typing
curl in your terminal:
The output will look something like this:
curl: try 'curl --help' or 'curl --manual' for more information
That’s it! You have successfully installed
curl on your Ubuntu machine, and you can start using it.
When used without any option,
curl prints the source code of the URL specified as an argument to the standard output.
For example, the following command will print the source of the
gnu.org homepage in your terminal window:
To download a file with
curl, use either the
-o option allows you to specify the name of the saved file:
curl -o linux.tar.xz https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/linux-5.0.5.tar.xz
When invoked with uppercase
curl saves the file with its original filename:
curl -O https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/linux-5.0.5.tar.xz
curl you can also fetch only the HTTP headers of the specified URL:
curl -I https://www.gnu.org/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 07:10:35 GMT Server: Apache/2.4.7 Content-Location: home.html Vary: negotiate,accept-language,Accept-Encoding TCN: choice Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=63072000 Access-Control-Allow-Origin: (null) Accept-Ranges: bytes Cache-Control: max-age=0 Expires: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 07:10:35 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Language: en
Another common use case of
curl is to download files from password-protected FTP servers:
curl -u FTP_USERNAME:FTP_PASSWORD ftp://ftp.example.com/file.tar.gz
Curl is a versatile tool that allows you to send and receive data over the network. Installing Curl on Ubuntu is a pretty simple task.
For more information about how to use this tool, visit Curl Command Examples .
If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to leave a comment.