GET(1)

✨ NAME ✨

okay bestie, meet lwp-request 🎀, a simple command line user agent that talks to WWW servers straight from your terminal 💻✨

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

lwp-request [-afPuUsSedvhx] [-m method] [-b base URL] [-t timeout]
            [-i if-modified-since] [-c content-type]
            [-C credentials] [-p proxy-url] [-o format] url...

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so this program is literally built to send requests to WWW servers and your local file system 🦋 the request content for POST, PUT and PATCH gets read from stdin 📥, the response content gets printed on stdout 🖨️, and error messages go to stderr 🚨. it also returns a status value telling you how many URLs failed 💀, which is so important 😭

the options are:

• -m <method> — pick the method for the request 💅 if you don't use this, the method gets derived from the name of the program 🧚
• -f — force the request through, even if the program thinks the method is illegal 🔥 the server might still reject it eventually 🙈
• -b <uri> — this URI becomes the base URI for resolving all the relative URIs you pass as arguments 🌸
• -t <timeout> — set the timeout for requests ⏰ this is how long the program waits for the remote server to respond before it gives up 😤 the default unit is seconds, but you can add "m" or "h" to make it minutes or hours 🫶 the default timeout is 3m, i.e. 3 minutes
• -i <time> — sets the If-Modified-Since header 📅 if time is the name of a file, the program uses that file's modification timestamp 📁 if it isn't a file, it gets parsed as a literal date 💜 check out HTTP::Date for the recognized formats
• -c <content-type> — set the Content-Type for the request 🎀 this only works for requests that take content, which means POST, PUT and PATCH 💖 you can force other methods to take content by using -f together with -c 🦋 the default Content-Type for POST is "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" 🍓 the default for the others is "text/plain" 🌈
• -p <proxy-url> — set the proxy for the requests 🧚 the program also loads proxy settings from the environment, but you can turn that off with -P 🙅‍♀️
• -P — don't load proxy settings from the environment 🚫
• -H <header> — send this HTTP header with each request ✨ you can specify several of these, like this:

lwp-request \
    -H 'Referer: http://other.url/' \
    -H 'Host: somehost' \
    http://this.url/

if the header name is prefixed with a colon, it won't get canonicalized 🙈 (see "NON-CANONICALIZED FIELD NAMES" in HTTP::Headers)

• -C <username>:<password> — provide credentials for documents protected by Basic Authentication 🔐 if the document is protected and you didn't give a username and password with this option, the program will prompt you for them 🥺

👀 Display options 👀

these options control what gets displayed by the program, and they're giving main character energy 👑

• -u — print the request method and absolute URL as requests are made 🦋
• -U — print the request headers too, on top of the method and absolute URL 📋
• -s — print the response status code 🔢 this one is always on for HEAD requests 💅
• -S — print the response status chain 🔗 this shows the redirect and authorization requests that the library handles for you 🫶
• -e — print the response headers 📨 this one is also always on for HEAD requests 💜
• -E — print the response status chain with the full response headers 🤯
• -d — don't print the content of the response 🙊
• -o <format> — process HTML content in various ways before printing it 🎨 if the response isn't HTML, this option does nothing 😭 the legal format values are "text", "ps", "links", "html" and "dump" 🌸
  • "text" formats the HTML as plain "latin1" text 📝
  • "ps" formats it as Postscript 🖨️
  • "links" outputs all the links found in the HTML document, and relative links get expanded to absolute ones 🔗
  • "html" reformats the HTML code 💅
  • "dump" just dumps the HTML syntax tree 🌳

the HTML-Tree distribution needs to be installed for this option to work 🚨 and the HTML-Format distribution also needs to be installed for -o text or -o ps to work 💀

• -v — print the version number of the program and quit 🏷️
• -h — print the usage message and quit 📖
• -a — set text (ascii) mode for content input and output 🔤 if you don't use this, content input and output is done in binary mode 🤖

because this program is built on the LWP library, it only supports the protocols that LWP supports 🫶

✨ SEE ALSO ✨

lwp-mirror, LWP 🦋

✨ COPYRIGHT ✨

Copyright 1995-1999 Gisle Aas. 💜

this library is free software, and you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself 🌈

✨ AUTHOR ✨

Gisle Aas <gisle@aas.no> 👑

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okay that's the whole tea ☕💖 this was the perl v5.42.2 version of GET(1), dated 2026-05-19. go be iconic with your requests, bestie 💅🧚✨