~aniket

Recent Notes

2 min read

curl, wget and find

curl

  • stands for Client URL
  • fetches stuff from the internet using protocols like HTTP, HTTPS, FTP and more
  • can be used for REST APIs, download / upload files, send form data and debug n/w requests
curl [option] [URL]

Use curl when you want to fetch, send, test, or debug network requests directly from the shell. It’s like your Swiss‑army knife for HTTP and APIs

# fetch html of a webpage
curl http://example.com
 
# send form data
curl -X POST -d "username=alice&password=1234" http://example.com/login
 
# file upload
curl -F "file=@report.pdf" http://example.com/upload

wget

  • stands for web get
  • used for downloading files from the web
  • supports http, https, and ftp
  • unlike curl, which can do all sorts of data transfers, wget is specialized for downloading files!
wget [options] [URL]

use wget when you want to download files or mirror websites. use curl when you want to interact with data and APIs.

# download a file
wget http://example.com/file.zip
 
# save with a diff name
wget -O myfile.zip http://example.com/file.zip
 
# resume a broken download
wget -c http://example.com/bigfile.iso
 
# download multiple files
wget -i filelist.txt

find

find files or dir in the system

find [path] [options] [expression] [action]
  • path → Where to start searching (e.g., /, ., /home/user)
  • options/expression → Criteria like name, size, user, type, etc.
  • action → What to do with the results (print, delete, exec another command, etc.)

If you don’t provide a path, find defaults to the current directory (.).

ex-

# find by name
find /home -name "file.txt"
 
# find by type "files" only
find . -type f -name "report*"
 
# find by size
find . -type f -size +50M

linux shell

202509241745

Graph View