Help

curl has more than two hundred and sixty command-line options and the number of options keep increasing over time. Chances are the number of options reaches or even surpasses three hundred in the coming years.

List options

To find out which options you need to perform a certain action, you can get curl to list them. First, curl --help or curl -h get you a list of the most important and frequently used options. You can then provide an additional "category" to -h to get more options listed for that specific area. Use curl -h category to list all existing categories or curl -h all to list all available options.

Help with a specific option

To get curl to display the documentation about a single specific command line option, add the option after -h. Use either the short name with a single dash (-) or the long version using two dashes (--).

For example, learn what -U does by running

curl -h -U

Or get --insecure explained like this:

curl -h --insecure

Full manual

The curl --manual option outputs the entire man page for curl. That is a thorough and complete document on how each option works amassing several thousand lines of documentation. To wade through that is also a tedious work and we encourage use of a search function through those text masses. Some people might also appreciate the man page in its web version.