curl stands for client URL, and you use it to talk to a server (URL) in whatever protocol you specify. Its used for development as a way to test client & server communication, built into applications to perform communication between a client & a server, and its used often because its extremely portable, has great error logging, can be rate limited, and can provide a substantial amount of detail about the communication.
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2025
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@curbstickle@anarchist.nexus like Facebook is a server while the app on my mobile is a client ?
Yes, facebook is running on a web server and the app (or a browser) is a client.
Yes, though really its a lot of servers.
I wouldn't worry about tools yet, I'd recommend getting a book/wiki on networking if you'd like to learn, its knowledge that builds.
It's a program to download stuff from the web. It is very flexible. You can tell it to use cookies, post form data, upload and download files. It can do basically everything a web browser does without a graphical user interface.
It is built into many software pieces. And developers love it to test stuff.
@bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de exactly.... I wish to avoid browsers and GUIs as far as I can.... So this tickled my curiosity........
Believe me, you aren't going to get used to nor enjoy "browsing" the web with curl. It's not what you think it is.
@asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev but I can fetch the web through the terminal emulator ??
@bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de
For that I would rather recommend a terminal browser like lynx, w3m or links2 in example. curl is more like a single web request to download one piece of raw file (an html page or an image in example). It is not meant to interpret websites and display results. If you want save webpages for offline view, then something like wget.
The modern internet isn't designed to be interacted with via a terminal.
So much of the internet today runs on JavaScript and curl won't run that
OP seems like an LMM
damn, people here are too kind. literally explaining everything op asks when it can literally be searched on wikipedia lmao...
Large… Mob Machine
@borf@lemmynsfw.com I'm sorry..... I'm on brainbin, and l'm yet to get familiar with how it works......
Curl is very low level. It will let you download things but won't display it to you in any really useful way. It is intended to be used by other applications.
If you're looking to use it to browse websites using the terminal, you need something that uses curl in the background but displays anything you download to you in a sensible way. Two such applications are lynx and links2. These will run in your terminal.
However you may not have much fun browsing facebook or anything modern. A lot of websites require javascript, which lynx or links2 will have trouble understanding.
This is links, running on the Terminal on my phone.
@dajoho@sh.itjust.works so this is how websites look like from the terminal ?