wcurl(1)

💅 wcurl(1) — the General Commands Manual, but make it cute ✨

okay so bestie, you're reading the General Commands Manual page for wcurl, and i promise this is gonna be the most painless download tool you've ever met 🫶

🌸 NAME 🌸

wcurl — a simple wrapper around curl to easily download files. that's it. that's the whole vibe. ✨

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

wcurl <URL>...

wcurl [--curl-options <CURL_OPTIONS>]... [--dry-run]
[--no-decode-filename] [-o|-O|--output <PATH>] [--] <URL>...

wcurl [--curl-options=<CURL_OPTIONS>]... [--dry-run]
[--no-decode-filename] [--output=<PATH>] [--] <URL>...

wcurl -V|--version

wcurl -h|--help

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

wcurl is a simple curl wrapper that lets you use curl to download files without having to remember any of the parameters. literally the whole point. no cap. 💅

You call wcurl with a list of URLs you want to download, and it picks sane defaults for you, like a friend who actually knows what they're doing 😌

If you need anything more complex, you can provide any of curl's supported parameters via the --curl-options option. Beware though — if your use case isn't covered, you likely should be using curl directly. highkey true 🙈

By default, wcurl does all of this:

• Percent-encode whitespace in URLs;
• Download multiple URLs in parallel — if the installed curl's version is >= 7.66.0 (--parallel);
• Use a total number of 5 parallel connections to the same protocol + hostname + port number target — if the installed curl's version is >= 8.16.0 (--parallel-max-host);
• Follow redirects;
• Automatically choose a filename as output;
• Avoid overwriting files — if the installed curl's version is >= 7.83.0 (--no-clobber);
• Perform retries;
• Set the downloaded file timestamp — to the value provided by the server, if available;
• Default to https — if the URL does not contain any scheme;
• Disable curl's URL globbing parser — so {} and [] characters in URLs are not treated specially;
• Percent-decode the resulting filename;
• Use index.html as the default filename — if there is none in the URL, or if it is -.

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⭐ OPTIONS ⭐

• --curl-options, --curl-options=<CURL_OPTIONS>... — Specify extra options to be passed when invoking curl. May be specified more than once. yes you can stack 'em 🔥
• -o, -O, --output, --output=<PATH> — Use the provided output path instead of getting it from the URL. If multiple URLs are provided, resulting files share the same name with a number appended to the end (curl >= 7.83.0). If this option is provided multiple times, only the last value is considered — the rest get ghosted 💀
• --no-decode-filename — Do not percent-decode the output filename, even if the percent-encoding in the URL was done by wcurl, e.g.: the URL contained whitespace 🙈
• --dry-run — Do not actually execute curl, print what would be invoked. peek before you leap, bestie 👀
• -V, --version — Print version information.
• -h, --help — Print help message.

🧚 CURL_OPTIONS 🧚

Any option supported by curl can be set here. This is not used by wcurl — it is instead forwarded to the curl invocation. middle-man energy, but make it useful ✨

The value is split on whitespace (spaces, tabs and newlines) and each resulting word is passed to curl as a separate argument. Quotes and backslashes are not interpreted, so an argument containing whitespace cannot be passed this way. For example, --curl-options='-H "Cookie: a=1; b=2"' passes the four arguments -H, "Cookie:, a=1; and b=2" to curl, which treats the extra words as URLs to download. 😭 yeah. it do be like that.

To pass arguments that contain whitespace, write them to a curl config file and pass it with --curl-options="--config <FILE>", or use curl directly.

⚠️ Everything in <CURL_OPTIONS> becomes part of the curl command line, so never build it from untrusted input. seriously. this is not the moment for main character energy, protect yourself 💖

🌈 URL 🌈

URL to be downloaded. Anything that is not a parameter is considered an URL. Whitespace is percent-encoded and the URL is passed to curl, which then performs the parsing. May be specified more than once. drop as many as you want, queen 👑

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🍓 EXAMPLES 🍓

Download a single file:

wcurl example.com/filename.txt

Download two files in parallel:

wcurl example.com/filename1.txt example.com/filename2.txt

Download a file passing the --progress-bar and --http2 flags to curl:

wcurl --curl-options="--progress-bar --http2" example.com/filename.txt

Resume from an interrupted download. The options necessary to resume the download (--clobber --continue-at -) must be the last options specified in --curl-options. Note that the only way to resume interrupted downloads is to allow wcurl to overwrite the destination file:

wcurl --curl-options="--clobber --continue-at -"
example.com/filename.txt

Download multiple files without a limit of concurrent connections per host (the default limit is 5):

wcurl --curl-options="--parallel-max-host 0" example.com/filename1.txt
example.com/filename2.txt

💜 AUTHORS 💜

• Samuel Henrique <samueloph@debian.org>
• Sergio Durigan Junior <sergiodj@debian.org>
• and many contributors, see the AUTHORS file. ily all 🫶

👑 REPORTING BUGS 👑

If you experience any problems with wcurl that you do not experience with curl, submit an issue on GitHub: https://github.com/curl/wcurl — pls include the deets so it can actually get fixed 🙏

✨ COPYRIGHT ✨

wcurl is licensed under the curl license.

🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

curl(1), trurl(1) — go read those too, iykyk 💅

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! this version of wcurl (version wcurl) dropped on 2026-10-25, so if your copy dates differently, that's why 🎀 slay, go download something 💖