The curl project, renowned for its versatile command-line tool for transferring data using various network protocols, has announced a new addition to its family: wcurl.
Initially developed as a standalone project focusing on Debian systems, wcurl has now found a home under the curl organization umbrella, promising a broader developmental scope and more robust community support.
This integration, announced by Daniel Stenberg, the original curl creator, marks a significant expansion of the curl suite, positioning the tool under the prestigious curl organization umbrella.
“I already wrote about wcurl. I will try to not repeat myself too much here, but starting now wcurl has its new home under the curl organization umbrella. It is now an official curl project.”
Now, how does this tool differ from curl? In the most general terms, the key difference is its use cases. Here’s what I mean.
While curl is renowned for its ability to transfer data using various protocols, wcurl is tailored to offer capabilities that enhance the user experience when downloading files. More specifically, the tool builds on curl with the following features:
- Ability to encode whitespaces in URLs, follow redirects, and perform retries.
- wcurl can download multiple URLs in parallel.
- Automatically choose a filename as output.
- Set the downloaded file timestamp to the value provided by the server, if available.
- Disable curl’s URL globbing parser so “{}” and “[]” characters in URLs are not treated specially.
For users and developers wanting to explore wcurl or contribute to its growth, all traffic to the previous repository will be redirected to the new URL under the curl organization: wcurl on GitHub.
Finally, just a quick note: if you’re looking to boost your command-line skills with curl, our comprehensive guide on the subject is definitely worth checking out.
