cURL is a command-line tool that is available on most UNIX®-like environments and Mac OS X® and can be downloaded for Windows® in order to interact with the ReST interfaces. For more information on cURL, visit http://curl.haxx.se/.
cURL allows you to transmit and receive HTTP requests and responses from the command-line or from within a shell script. This makes it possible to work with the ReST API directly without using one of the client APIs.
The following cURL command-line options will be used in this guide to run the examples:
cURL Command-Line Options
-dSends the specified data in a post request to the HTTP server.
-iIncludes the HTTP header in the output.
-H HEADERSpecify an HTTP header in the request.
-XSpecifies the request method to use when communicating with the HTTP server. The specified request is used instead of the default method, which is GET. For example,
-X PUTspecifies to use the PUT request method.
![[Note]](/cdb-v1.0-cdb-getting-started/common/images/admon/note.png) | Note |
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If you have the tools, you can run the cURL JSON request examples with the following options to format the output from cURL: <curl JSON request example> | python -mjson.tool. |
