Daniel Steenberg, author of the utility for obtaining and sending data on the network Curl, announced the official acceptance of the utility WCURL by the Curl project. WCURL will continue to be developed in a separate repository, independent of Curl. The utility is being developed by one of the debian maintainers and is now included in Debian Testing, Debian Unstable, and Debian 12 as part of the curl package . The WCURL code is written in Shell and is distributed under the Curl license (MIT License).
WCURL is a powerful tool that simplifies file downloads by providing a more user-friendly interface compared to Curl. It allows users to download multiple files simultaneously, automatically handle redirects, and retry downloads in case of failures. Instead of streaming output, WCURL saves downloaded information to files with names based on the links or server responses. It also sets file modification times based on server-provided Last-Modified HTTP headers.
WCURL ensures that existing files are not overwritten by adding digits to file names if necessary. It also supports parallel downloads of multiple links, automatically replaces spaces in links with “%XX” formats, and disables processing of “{ }” and “[ ]” substitutions in URLs. Users can customize Curl options using the “–curl-options” flag and preview Curl commands without executing them using the “-dry-Run” option.
In addition to WCURL, Steenberg also introduced the utility TRURL last year. TRURL enhances Curl with features for analyzing and manipulating URLs, such as host and page renaming, parameter substitution, and URL-to-JSON conversions. TRURL code is written in C and Perl and is available under the Curl license.