Hi folks,

I’m curious if anyone has ever proposed an option to make curl behave similar to less with respect to binary data; i.e. when writing binary data to a TTY, first confirm with a prompt:

$ curl http://example.com/somelargebinary.gz
Output may be binary data. Print anyway?

I have the habit of using curl to both inspect website HTML content and download large files, and in the latter case I often forget to pass the -o/-O option and end up with an unresponsive, corrupted terminal as a large amount of binary data is written to it and escape sequences are processed etc. And of course this is particularly painful when I make the mistake in an SSH session. I’m envisioning an off-by-default option to enable the prompt, which I could stick it in my ~/.curlrc.

Perhaps I’m the only one foolish enough to frequently suffer from this problem?

--Ramesh
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Received on 2014-02-25