Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Command Line Tool: curl

toolsToday I watched a video on Atom Publishing Protocol at YouTube.com GoogleDevelopers. Further reading on this topic, I found an article on this by IBM: Getting to know the Atom Publishing Protocol Part 1.

One thing that got my attention is the command line tool: curl. In my Mac terminal, I found this one is available. That's Unix world benefit. According to the manual information of curl(man curl):

curl is a tool to transfer data from or to server, using one of the supported protocols (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, SCP, SETP, TFTP, DICT, TELNET, LDAP, or FILE). The command is designed to work without user interaction.

That's a great tool. I like this one so that I can interact with a web server in command line. For example I tried this command to get a feed from a server:

curl -s -X GET http://heeds.beedburner.com/Macblogz?format=xml

Immediately I got returned strings back in the terminal. I tried to use Fixfox to open the feed but I could not GET result back in browser. Firefox prompted me to add it to my bookmark. By using curl tool, I can get the result back for analysis. It's a great tool to test and verify Atom Publishing Server or any web servers.

I don't think Windows cmd terminal has this one available. It might be something similar in PowerShell.

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