For debugging home made servers it's quiet nice (if you don't want to wireshark): curl -silent http://i.imgur.com/0nCbgbi.jpg |hexdump -C |less Now you co

For debugging home made servers it's quiet nice (if you don't want to wireshark): curl -silent http://i.imgur.com/0nCbgbi.jpg |hexdump -C |less Now you could automate this for testing, etc. There are use cases for terminal output and changing this behavior now would probably wreck many 3rd party scripts. And if you really just want a simple download manager you probably should use wget anyways.