curl -GET and -X GET

Question

Curl offers a series of different http method calls that are prefixed with a X  but also offers the same methods without  I ve tried both and I can t seem to figure out the difference  Can someone explain to me quickly how these two operations differ

User · Answer

The use of -X  WHATEVER  merely changes the request s method string used in the HTTP request  This is easier to understand with two examples     one with -X  WHATEVER  and one without     and the associated HTTP request headers for each     curl -XPANTS -o nul -v http   neverssl com    Connected to neverssl com  13 224 86 126  port 80   0   gt  PANTS   HTTP 1 1  gt  Host  neverssl com  gt  User-Agent  curl 7 42 0  gt  Accept         curl -o nul -v http   neverssl com    Connected to neverssl com  13 33 50 167  port 80   0   gt  GET   HTTP 1 1  gt  Host  neverssl com  gt  User-Agent  curl 7 42 0  gt  Accept

User · Answer

By default you use curl without explicitly saying which request method to use  If you just pass in a HTTP URL like curl http   example com it will use GET  If you use -d or -F curl will use POST  -I will cause a HEAD and -T will make it a PUT  If for whatever reason you re not happy with these default choices that curl does for you  you can override those request methods by specifying -X  WHATEVER   This way you can for example send a DELETE by doing curl -X DELETE  URL   It is thus pointless to do curl -X GET  URL  as GET would be used anyway  In the same vein it is pointless to do curl -X POST -d data  URL     But you can make a fun and somewhat rare request that sends a request-body in a GET request with something like curl -X GET -d data  URL   Digging deeper curl -GET  using a single dash  is just wrong for this purpose  That s the equivalent of specifying the -G  -E and -T options and that will do something completely different  There s also a curl option called --get to not confuse matters with either  It is the long form of -G  which is used to convert data specified with -d into a GET request instead of a POST   I subsequently used my own answer here to populate the curl FAQ to cover this   Warnings Modern versions of curl will inform users about this unnecessary and potentially harmful use of -X when verbose mode is enabled  -v  - to make users aware  Further explained and motivated in this blog post  -G converts a POST   body to a GET   query You can ask curl to convert a set of -d options and instead of sending them in the request body with POST  put them at the end of the URL s query string and issue a GET  with the use of  -G  Like this  curl -d name daniel -d grumpy yes -G https   example com

User · Answer

-X  your method  X lets you override the default  Get       corrected lowercase x to uppercase X

[curl] curl -GET and -X GET

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