curl/docs/cmdline-opts/output.md

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c: Copyright (C) Daniel Stenberg, daniel@haxx.se, et al. SPDX-License-Identifier: curl Long: output Arg: Short: o Help: Write to file instead of stdout Category: important output Added: 4.0 Multi: per-URL See-also:

• out-null
• remote-name
• remote-name-all
• remote-header-name
• compressed Example:
• -o file $URL
• "http://{one,two}.example.com" -o "file_#1.txt"
• "http://{site,host}.host[1-5].example" -o "#1_#2"
• -o file $URL -o file2 https://example.net

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--output

Write output to the given file instead of stdout. If you are using globbing in the URL to fetch multiple documents, you should quote the URL and you can use # followed by a number in the filename. That variable gets replaced with the current glob text. Like in:

curl "http://{one,two}.example.com" -o "file_#1.txt"

or use several variables like:

curl "http://{site,host}.host[1-5].example" -o "#1_#2"

You may use this option as many times as the number of URLs you have. For example, if you specify two URLs on the same command line, you can use it like this:

curl -o aa example.com -o bb example.net

and the order of the -o options and the URLs does not matter, only that the first -o is for the first URL and so on, so the above command line can also be written as

curl example.com example.net -o aa -o bb

See also the --create-dirs option to create the local directories dynamically. Specifying the output as '-' (a single dash) passes the output to stdout.

To suppress response bodies, you can redirect output to /dev/null:

curl example.com -o /dev/null

Or for Windows:

curl example.com -o nul

Or, even more efficient and portable, use

curl example.com --out-null

Specify the filename as single minus to force the output to stdout, to override curl's internal binary output in terminal prevention:

curl https://example.com/jpeg -o -

Note that the binary output may be caused by the response being compressed, in which case you may want to use the --compressed option.

Since curl 8.21.0, the separate globbing parts can be named and referenced by their names. The case sensitive alphanumeric name is set enclosed within angle brackets after the opening character. Examples:

curl "https://fun.example/{<num>one,two}.jpg" -o "save-#<num>"

curl "ftp://ftp.example/file[<range>1-100].txt" \
  -o "save-#<range>.txt"

Referencing a named glob that is not set, causes an error.

Since curl 8.21.0, you can use parts of the upload filename when it uses globbing by setting a glob name and referencing it the same way you reference named URL globs. For example, if you upload three files to a single fixed HTTP URL and want to save the corresponding responses in separate files:

curl -T 'file{<num>1,2,3}' \
  https://upload.example/ -o 'response-#<num>'