wcurl(1) User Commands wcurl(1)

wcurl - a simple wrapper around curl to easily download files.

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

wcurl is a simple curl wrapper which lets you use curl to download files without having to remember any parameters.

Simply call wcurl with a list of URLs you want to download and wcurl picks sane defaults.

If you need anything more complex, you can provide any of curl's supported parameters via the --curl-options option. Just beware that you likely should be using curl directly if your use case is not covered.

By default, wcurl does:

* Percent-encode whitespaces in URLs;
* Download multiple URLs in parallel
if the installed curl's version is >= 7.66.0 (--parallel);
* 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.

Specify extra options to be passed when invoking curl. May be specified more than once.
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.
Don't percent-decode the output filename, even if the percent-encoding in the URL was done by wcurl, e.g.: The URL contained whitespaces.
Do not actually execute curl, just print what would be invoked.
Print version information.
Print help message.

Any option supported by curl can be set here. This is not used by wcurl; it is instead forwarded to the curl invocation.

URL to be downloaded. Anything that is not a parameter is considered an URL. Whitespaces are percent-encoded and the URL is passed to curl, which then performs the parsing. May be specified more than once.

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 (if more options are used, this needs to be the last one in the list):

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

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

If you experience any problems with wcurl that you do not experience with curl, submit an issue on Github: https://github.com/curl/wcurl

wcurl is licensed under the curl license

curl(1), trurl(1)

2025-07-08 wcurl