Curl -Get and -X Get
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...
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?
3 Answers
By default you use curl without explicitly saying which request method to use. If you just pass in a HTTP URL like curl 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].
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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.)
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