I am using cURL command line utility to send HTTP POST to a web service. I want to include a file's contents as the body entity of the POST. I have tried using -d </path/to/filename> as well as other variants with type info like --data </path/to/filename> --data-urlencode </path/to/filename> etc... the file is always attached. I need it as the body entity.
In my case, @ caused some sort of encoding problem, I still prefer my old way:
curl -d "$(cat /path/to/file)" https://example.com
I know the question has been answered, but in my case I was trying to send the content of a text file to the Slack Webhook api and for some reason the above answer did not work. Anywho, this is what finally did the trick for me:
curl -X POST -H --silent --data-urlencode "payload={\"text\": \"$(cat file.txt | sed "s/\"/'/g")\"}" https://hooks.slack.com/services/XXX
Source: Stackoverflow.com