The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - BONUS — Magic cURL Feature (Interview)

Episode Date: April 30, 2015

This is a bonus clip from the after call with Daniel Stenberg for episode #153. Daniel shared the details of a "magic feature" in cURL that's been there for over 6 years. It's a feature he feels most people don't know exists.

All right, this is a quick teaser for episode 153. Jared and I are talking to Daniel Stenberg, the creator of Curl, and Daniel shares with us a super secret, a magic feature. As a matter of fact, it's six years in the making, been there for a very long time. And as far as he could tell, no one knows about it. Daniel, hey, is there a way to create an RC file for curl, so a curl RC file in your.files, and set curl to use the O flag, the capital O flag, by default, so when I curl URLs, it just pulls those things down by default. Well, he had this to say. Take a listen.

I get that accusation quite a lot that you can type wget without an option to save in a local file, and with curl you have to type dash capital O to do it. So I added an option that you can put in your.curlrc file and have it work like that by default. What do you actually put in there? You just put the dash O in your curlrc and that's it? No, it's more complicated than that because the dash O is only for one URL.

So if you type more than one URL, you'd have to type one dash O for every URL you use. So this special magic one is called dash dash remote dash name dash all, as in remote name all. Wow. dash dash remote dash name dash all as in remote name all. Wow. It makes the equivalent of dash capital O for all URLs that you type on the command line. I love that you just described it as the magic one.

I would say that it probably is magic because, well, there's not that many users who know about this. All right, that was Daniel Stenberg, the creator of Curl, sharing a magic feature that's been in Curl for over six years now. And no one knew about it until today. Check the show notes for details on how to add that RC file to your.files and set that capital O flag by default.

If you want to be notified when we ship episode 153, we send an email every Saturday. It's called ChangeLog Weekly. It's where we share everything that hits our open source radar. We also include our latest episodes. Go to changelog.com

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