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wcurl

Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: 2026-07-12
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NAME

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

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 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.

OPTIONS

--curl-options, --curl-options=<CURL_OPTIONS>...: Specify extra options to be passed when invoking curl. May be specified more than once.
-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.
--no-decode-filename: 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.
--dry-run: Do not actually execute curl, just print what would be invoked.
-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.

URL

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.

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

AUTHORS

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

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

COPYRIGHT

wcurl is licensed under the curl license

This document was created by man2html, using the manual pages.
Time: 11:48:39 GMT, September 14, 2026