11 ms·

> This is curl’s 249th command line option

ainar-g 4y ago
Almost quarter of a thousand. Yay! That does raise an interesting question though. If one wanted to create a command-line tool (or, rather, toolset) as comprehensive as curl, but with a much smaller API surface, how would they go about it? Sure, some of these flags are just shorthands, and some of them could be removed entirely (-o → stdout redirection), but that still leaves a lot of options.
- mmh0000 4y ago
  Ah. But -o is useful. What if I’m running curl directly without a shell (e.g. in a container). How else would I save the output to a file?
  - thih9 4y ago
    wget ;)
    - bombcar 4y ago
      On some systems without wget I have to alias wget to curl -o or whatever it is.
- pjc50 4y ago
  How would you keep it there? You'd have to spend a lot of effort discouraging feature requests.
  - danuker 4y ago
    You don't need to discourage them. Just ignore them. Perhaaps take a look at the most popular ones every now and then, but a free software project owes the world nothing.
    - thih9 4y ago
      In theory yes. In practice I assume (I have no practical experience) that as the project gets larger the number of involved parties grows. And suddenly you need to balance interests of not just you but also the community, contributors, large users, sponsors and possibly more.
- tyingq 4y ago
  Curl supports a lot of crazy stuff that adds command line options, like IMAP/LDAP/POP3/SMTP means adding --login-options, --mail-auth, --mail-from, --mail-rcpt-allowfails, --mail-rcpt. If you read the man page, you'll find other flags that aren't really central to a http(s) fetch tool, like ftp, tftp.
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  Curl is really really big on backwards compatibility, which I don't mean to critisize. If you were starting over from scratch even trying to make it curl-like, you could probably trim down the options substantially. The OP is in fact an example of a new option that can more-or-less cover the same functionality as some old options, plus more, but the old options remain.
UI_at_80x24 4y ago
Wow. Every time I've tried to dig into the man pages to find an option that I need it's been overwhelming; and now I know why! This is one seriously under appreciated piece of code, and I am so grateful that it exists.
- bpoyner 4y ago
  They changed the curl man page in the last year so that all options have 'see also' recommendations. The documentation is amazing. https://twitter.com/bagder/status/1460867775690387457 https://twitter.com/bagder/status/1460867775690387457
pablobaz 4y ago
I wonder will they have a party when they hit 250?
- danuker 4y ago
  I would do it at 256
nickcw 4y ago
This made me smile! And also $ rclone help flags . | grep "^ *--" | wc -l 665 (yes rclone has a command to grep its flags `rclone help flags <regex>`!)
ape4 4y ago
The article says the new option replaces the -G option. But, of course, for compatibility they cannot remove -G.

Almost quarter of a thousand. Yay! That does raise an interesting question though. If one wanted to create a command-line tool (or, rather, toolset) as comprehensive as curl, but with a much smaller API surface, how would they go about it? Sure, some of these flags are just shorthands, and some of them could be removed entirely (-o → stdout redirection), but that still leaves a lot of options.

mmh0000 4y ago
Ah. But -o is useful. What if I’m running curl directly without a shell (e.g. in a container). How else would I save the output to a file?
- thih9 4y ago
  wget ;)
  - bombcar 4y ago
    On some systems without wget I have to alias wget to curl -o or whatever it is.
pjc50 4y ago
How would you keep it there? You'd have to spend a lot of effort discouraging feature requests.
- danuker 4y ago
  You don't need to discourage them. Just ignore them. Perhaaps take a look at the most popular ones every now and then, but a free software project owes the world nothing.
  - thih9 4y ago
    In theory yes. In practice I assume (I have no practical experience) that as the project gets larger the number of involved parties grows. And suddenly you need to balance interests of not just you but also the community, contributors, large users, sponsors and possibly more.
tyingq 4y ago
Curl supports a lot of crazy stuff that adds command line options, like IMAP/LDAP/POP3/SMTP means adding --login-options, --mail-auth, --mail-from, --mail-rcpt-allowfails, --mail-rcpt. If you read the man page, you'll find other flags that aren't really central to a http(s) fetch tool, like ftp, tftp.
jrochkind1 4y ago
Curl is really really big on backwards compatibility, which I don't mean to critisize. If you were starting over from scratch even trying to make it curl-like, you could probably trim down the options substantially. The OP is in fact an example of a new option that can more-or-less cover the same functionality as some old options, plus more, but the old options remain.

UI_at_80x24 4y ago

Wow. Every time I've tried to dig into the man pages to find an option that I need it's been overwhelming; and now I know why! This is one seriously under appreciated piece of code, and I am so grateful that it exists.

bpoyner 4y ago
They changed the curl man page in the last year so that all options have 'see also' recommendations. The documentation is amazing. https://twitter.com/bagder/status/1460867775690387457 https://twitter.com/bagder/status/1460867775690387457

pablobaz 4y ago

I wonder will they have a party when they hit 250?

danuker 4y ago
I would do it at 256

nickcw 4y ago

This made me smile! And also $ rclone help flags . | grep "^ *--" | wc -l 665 (yes rclone has a command to grep its flags `rclone help flags <regex>`!)

ape4 4y ago

The article says the new option replaces the -G option. But, of course, for compatibility they cannot remove -G.