How To Download a File With cURL?

To download a file with cURL, we can use the -O option. Let's attempt to download a PDF file on web-scraping.dev with cURL:

curl -O https://web-scraping.dev/assets/pdf/eula.pdf

The above command will result in the following output and save the file to the same directory of the opened terminal:

  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100 10287  100 10287    0     0  10769      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 10783

Next, let's download a file with cURL to a specific folder location with the --output-dir cURL option:

curl --create-dirs -O --output-dir /eula/pdfs https://web-scraping.dev/assets/pdf/eula.pdf

The above cURL command will download the PDf file and save it to the /eula/pdfs directory. For further details on cURL, refer to our dedicated guide.

How to Use cURL For Web Scraping?

Learn how to send HTTP requests with cURL and how to use cURL for web scraping, such as scraping dynamic pages and avoiding getting blocked.