The double-dash question just shows you’re not a regular user of command line tools in the *nix world. They all have those for the long names, single-dashes are for the single-letter options.

And please, if you really want your feedback to reach the curl project and not just me personally, you should subscribe to the appropriate curl mailing list and post your feedback there and be prepared for a discussion with other users and hackers around them.

Thanks nonetheless!

I use AutoHotkey for all my scripting needs and I now run curl from within my autohotkey script with all my preconfigured user-agent, referer, number of retries, urls etc. and I’m very impressed. Not a single error with curl so far! This program is great.

Naturally, I was interested if other tools like it existed. And I discovered wget as well.

I don’t know if you might be interested, but these are the command lines I use from my autohotkey scripts using curl and wget. Both scripts are identical except this one line. %userAgent%, %webpage% (referer) and %url% are defined elsewhere in the script.

curl -C – -v -q -O –retry 10 –retry-delay 2 -A “%userAgent%” -e %webpage% %url%

wget -c -d -U “%userAgent%” –referer=”%webpage%” %url%

Always starting a download with resume option (-C – with curl & -c with wget) works fine with both curl and wget. It was easier for me to give the same command line for both – starting new download & resuming an incomplete/partial download – from my autohotkey script. I’ve found that both programs handle the uniform command line for both starting and resuming situations perfectly well.

Although curl requires -O and –retry options explicitly unlike wget which supports them by default, this is NOT a problem for me (unlike some people who mailed to you mentioning their wget bias just for this reason) as long as it supports those features in any way.

So, basically both curl and wget serve my personal automated chain downloading process. But the main reason I PREFER curl is that I need all of these three real time updates – Total Time, Time Spent & Time Left. These three real-time statistics are very useful to me when I’m actually attending my downloads.

By comparison, wget just shows Time Left – it does not show Total Time or Time Spent, which every downloader should.

But the most important thing is the reliability of downloads, especially performance over slow networks. In this repect, the statement “Wget has been designed for robustness over slow network connections; if a download fails due to a network problem, it will keep retrying until the whole file has been retrieved” really helps the end user’s peace of mind. And although wget uses HTTP/1.0, it does support the significant features introduced with HTTP/1.1 such as Range headers necessary for resuming partial/interrupted downloads – which it does so perfectly.

By comparison, I read that “data corruption issue with re-connected transfers” was one of the bugs fixed with the latest version of curl 7.19.7. While I am extremely glad that this bug is now fixed, I cannot help being surprised that this bug remained till this version even though curl dates back to 1997!

I must add that in my limited experience of just one week, curl also has resumed each and every partial/interrupted download over my slow network perfectly well. I’m sure that extensive tests have been made for such data reliability but I want you to assure in the front web page of curl as well as at the top of every kind of curl documentation, the help and manual pages for example, that curl can also be relied for “robustness over slow networks and re-connected transfers” just as much as any other download tool in the world.

I would also like to point out that it would be nice if curl also showed the program name and the percent downloaded on the title bar like wget. That helps when I work on my computer with download window sitting minimized in the Windows Taskbar. Just a cursory glance can show the percent downloaded status.

I don’t know whether this is a proper place for such a lengthy comment but I figured I’d get lesser competition for your attention here. Please forgive me if I made a wrong judgement.

We provide both makefiles and Visual Studio project files that can build libcurl just fine on Windows. What else do people need?