Do you remember August 26 2002? I can’t say I particularly do but the curl git log remembers for us that it was on that day we added this TODO item:

Add an option that prevents cURL from overwriting existing local files. When used, and there already is an existing file with the target file name (either -O or -o), a number should be appended (and increased if already existing).

That idea hadn’t even been listed for twenty years before it was converted into code by HexTheDragon and landed in curl the other day (with this commit). To get included in the pending curl 7.83.0 release.

--no-clobber

This new command line option (curl’s 247th) is called --no-clobber and it works as suggested already back in 2002. If the output file already exists at the time when curl wants to create it, it will instead append a number to the end of the name. If that file also exists, curl retries iteratively with numbers up to a 100 before it gives up and returns error.

To help you write even cooler scripts. Oh, and the -w variable %{filename_effective} will show this actually used file name.