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Current versions of the chrome debugger (and maybe others!) will let you print out the curl command to retrieve a resource that is completely inaccessible in th

Current versions of the chrome debugger (and maybe others!) will let you print out the curl command to retrieve a resource that is completely inaccessible in the web interface. If you keep a little media server like plex, et al, it's a really convenient tool for time shifting/stealing/whatever the word is some video on a website that won't let you at the video source. You just open the debugger, view the network resources, click play, sort by size, right click the one that is growing (the video), get the curl, paste it into a terminal with a -o flag, and now you have the video. Whether you should have it is another thread, not this one.

adamtj 12y ago
It sounds like maybe you are most familiar with GUIs or the web. Curl is a UNIX tool and doesn't work like those things. If it's the only unix tool you use, that might seem jarring. Of course it would be a smoother experience for you if it worked more like the rest of the tools you are familiar with, but changing it would be a mistake. If curl were changed, then it would be one of the few unix tools that differs from the rest. That would make it jarring to people who use unix. Nobody wants to erode the good parts of unix and destroy the unix way just to make some commands slightly less jarring to people who don't regularly use unix. Especially when you don't even need curl. That's the wrong option for you. Right next to the option in Chrome to copy a curl command is the option to copy just the url. Just use that and paste the url into your browser, which will work more like you'd expect. If you must use curl, you almost certainly don't want to use "-o". That's an advanced option for when you are downloading multiple resources with a single command. You use it to provide a template for the multiple output filenames necessary in that particular situation. If you only want to specify a single filename, then do like you would with any other typical unix command and redirect the output to a file. For example, append ">filename.html" to the end of the command. Unix tools rarely have options to specify output filenames. They are as unnecessary as a button in a web browser that will let you "Display this webpage." Displaying webpages is what a web browser does, and writing output to a file is what a unix command does. It's just that the default file for a unix command is your terminal. Your shell makes it dead simple to pick a different one if that's what you want.

adamtj 12y ago

It sounds like maybe you are most familiar with GUIs or the web. Curl is a UNIX tool and doesn't work like those things. If it's the only unix tool you use, that might seem jarring. Of course it would be a smoother experience for you if it worked more like the rest of the tools you are familiar with, but changing it would be a mistake. If curl were changed, then it would be one of the few unix tools that differs from the rest. That would make it jarring to people who use unix. Nobody wants to erode the good parts of unix and destroy the unix way just to make some commands slightly less jarring to people who don't regularly use unix. Especially when you don't even need curl. That's the wrong option for you. Right next to the option in Chrome to copy a curl command is the option to copy just the url. Just use that and paste the url into your browser, which will work more like you'd expect. If you must use curl, you almost certainly don't want to use "-o". That's an advanced option for when you are downloading multiple resources with a single command. You use it to provide a template for the multiple output filenames necessary in that particular situation. If you only want to specify a single filename, then do like you would with any other typical unix command and redirect the output to a file. For example, append ">filename.html" to the end of the command. Unix tools rarely have options to specify output filenames. They are as unnecessary as a button in a web browser that will let you "Display this webpage." Displaying webpages is what a web browser does, and writing output to a file is what a unix command does. It's just that the default file for a unix command is your terminal. Your shell makes it dead simple to pick a different one if that's what you want.