Install wcurl

First check if your distro/OS vendor ships wcurl as part of their official repositories, wcurl might be shipped as part of the curl package.

If they don't ship it, consider making a request for it.

You can always install wcurl by simply downloading the script:

curl -fLO https://github.com/curl/wcurl/releases/latest/download/wcurl
chmod +x wcurl

Install wcurl's manpage

curl -fLO https://github.com/curl/wcurl/releases/latest/download/wcurl.1
sudo mv wcurl.1 /usr/share/man/man1/wcurl.1

wcurl(1)

wcurl

• a simple wrapper around curl to easily download files.

Synopsis

wcurl <URL>...
wcurl [--curl-options <CURL_OPTIONS>]... [--no-decode-filename] [-o|-O|--output <PATH>] [--dry-run] [--] <URL>...
wcurl [--curl-options=<CURL_OPTIONS>]... [--no-decode-filename] [--output=<PATH>] [--dry-run] [--] <URL>...
wcurl -V|--version
wcurl -h|--help

Description

wcurl is a simple curl wrapper which lets you use curl to download files without having to remember any parameters.

Simply call wcurl with a list of URLs you want to download and wcurl will pick sane defaults.

If you need anything more complex, you can provide any of curl's supported parameters via the --curl-options option. Just beware that you likely should be using curl directly if your use case is not covered.

• By default, wcurl will:
  • Percent-encode whitespaces in URLs;
  • Download multiple URLs in parallel if the installed curl's version is >= 7.66.0;
  • Follow redirects;
  • Automatically choose a filename as output;
  • Avoid overwriting files if the installed curl's version is >= 7.83.0 (--no-clobber);
  • Perform retries;
  • Set the downloaded file timestamp to the value provided by the server, if available;
  • Disable curl's URL globbing parser so {} and [] characters in URLs are not treated specially;
  • Percent-decode the resulting filename;
  • Use "index.html" as default filename if there's none in the URL.

Options

• --curl-options, curl-options=<CURL_OPTIONS>...

  Specify extra options to be passed when invoking curl. May be specified more than once.

• -o, -O, --output, --output=<PATH>

  Use the provided output path instead of getting it from the URL. If multiple URLs are provided, all files will have the same name with a number appended to the end (curl >= 7.83.0). If this option is provided multiple times, only the last value is considered.

• --no-decode-filename

  Don't percent-decode the output filename, even if the percent-encoding in the URL was done by wcurl, e.g.: The URL contained whitespaces.

• --dry-run

  Don't actually execute curl, just print what would be invoked.

• -V, --version

  Print version information.

• -h, --help

  Print help message.

Url

Anything which is not a parameter will be considered an URL. wcurl will percent-encode whitespaces and pass that to curl, which will perform the parsing of the URL.

Examples

• Download a single file:

  wcurl example.com/filename.txt

• Download two files in parallel:

  wcurl example.com/filename1.txt example.com/filename2.txt

• Download a file passing the --progress-bar and --http2 flags to curl:

  wcurl --curl-options="--progress-bar --http2" example.com/filename.txt

• Resume from an interrupted download (if more options are used, this needs to be the last one in the list):

  wcurl --curl-options="--continue-at -" example.com/filename.txt

Running the testsuite

If you would like to run the tests, you will first need to install the shunit2 package. On Debian-like and Fedora-like systems, the package is called shunit2.

After that, you can run the testsuite by simply invoking the test script:

./tests/tests.sh

Lint

To lint the shell scripts, you need to install shellcheck and checkbashisms. Those tools will check the scripts for issues and ensure they follow best practices.

• On Debian-like systems: apt install shellcheck devscripts
• On Fedora-like systems: dnf install shellcheck devscripts

After installation, you can run shellcheck and checkbashisms by executing the following commands:

shellcheck wcurl ./tests/*

checkbashisms wcurl ./tests/*

Authors

Samuel Henrique <samueloph@debian.org>
Sergio Durigan Junior <sergiodj@debian.org>
and many contributors, see the AUTHORS file.

Reporting Bugs

If you experience any problems with wcurl that you do not experience with curl, submit an issue here.

Copyright

wcurl is licensed under the curl license

See Also

curl(1)