Starting in curl 7.55.0 (since this commit), you can tell curl to read custom headers from a file. A feature that has been asked for numerous times in the past, and the answer has always been to write a shell script to do it. Like this:

#!/bin/sh
while read line; do
  args="$args -H '$line'";
done
curl $args $URL

That’s now a response of the past (or for users stuck on old curl versions). We can now instead tell curl to read headers itself from a file using the curl standard @filename way:

$ curl -H @headers https://example.com

… and this also works if you want to just send custom headers to the proxy you do CONNECT to:

$ curl --proxy-headers @headers --proxy proxy:8080 https://example.com/

(this is a pure curl tool change that doesn’t affect libcurl, the library)