On Mon, 2009-06-22 at 01:00 -0400, Amit Misra wrote:
> I am trying to use the 'range' option in curl to get only the first 8k
> bytes or a file from a web server.
> It does not seeem to work. Do I need some kind of server support to do
> this?

The server certainly does need to cooperate in order for the Range:
header to work. Per HTTP/1.1, servers are allowed to ignore the Range
header and just deliver the full content, although more or less all of
the commonly-used http servers will respect Range when it's feasible to
do so (static files on disk, for example). What server are you
observing this to not work with, and can you post a trace of the HTTP
protocol exchange?

Anyway, if you want the first 8kB specifically then you can just close
the connection once you've read the amount of data you want. (It would
still be a good idea to send the Range header as well, so as not to
waste the server's resources, but from your point of view it wouldn't be
necessary.)

p.
Received on 2009-06-22