Ytdyklly

$ cat file | curl -F 'sprunge=<-' http://sprunge.us

So the output of echo gets passed as a POST parameter to cURL. Is this a cURL specific feature?

- is commonly used to represent standard input and < is commonly used to
represent redirection from a file. I believe those syntaxes come from early
shells. Together, they imply taking in standard input and sending/redirecting
it elsewhere. The syntax is almost natural.

Looking at the cURL revision history,
the < syntax was added to cURL in mid-2000. The revision that added this
feature is available as Git commit 5b7a5046e6.

From the changelog,

Torsten Foertsch <torsten.foertsch at gmx.net> brought a set of fixes for

the rfc1867 form posts. He introduced 'name=<file' which brings a means to

suuply very large text chunks read from the given file name. It differs from

'name=@file' in the way that this latter thing is marked in the uploaded

contents as a file upload, while the first is just text (as in a input or

textarea field). Torsten also corrected a bug that would happen if you used

%s or similar in a -F file name.

There is no mention of the inspiration or origin of this feature.

The @- syntax was present in cURL in the earliest version of the source I
could find. From the first revision in late 1999,

/* postfield data */

if('@' == *nextarg) {

  /* the data begins with a '@' letter, it means that a file name

     or - (stdin) follows */

  FILE *file;

  nextarg++; /* pass the @ */

It's difficult to determine if it is cURL-specific. The syntax is common and
natural. The cURL feature with which it is associated is a base feature of
cURL. Tools similar to cURL are likely to implement some form if it.

The original question asked about

$ echo foo | curl -d 'sprunge=<-' http://sprunge.us

Here was my answer:

I do not believe that is a feature of cURL.

$ # Terminal A

$ curl --version

curl 7.31.0 (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.31.0 OpenSSL/1.0.1e zlib/1.2.8 libssh2/1.4.3

Protocols: dict file ftp ftps gopher http https imap imaps pop3 pop3s rtsp scp sftp smtp smtps telnet tftp

Features: AsynchDNS IPv6 Largefile NTLM NTLM_WB SSL libz TLS-SRP

$

$ echo foo | curl -d 'sprunge=<-' localhost:2222



$ # Terminal B

$ nc -l 2222

POST / HTTP/1.1

User-Agent: curl/7.31.0

Host: localhost:2222

Accept: */*

Content-Length: 7

Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded



sprunge=<-

I couldn't find any mention of this feature in the cURL documentation. There is a similar feature though.

If you start the data with the letter @, the rest should be a file name to
read the data from, or - if you want curl to read the data from stdin. The
contents of the file must already be URL-encoded. Multiple files can also be
specified. Posting data from a file named 'foobar' would thus be done with
--data @foobar.

Spying on curl with socat

The updated question regarding this command:

$ cat file | curl -F 'sprunge=<-' http://sprunge.us

Is doing several things. Using socat we can spy on the request like so in one terminal:

$ socat - TCP4-LISTEN:2222,fork | grep -E 'Content-Disp|msg'

Now in a second terminal we'll use your curl command to connect to our socat daemon. For the cat file we're going to use this as our sample file:

$ cat hello.txt

msg: hello curl

And when we curl:

$ cat ~/hello.txt | curl -Fblah=<- localhost:2222

We see this in the socat output:

Content-Disposition: form-data; name="blah"

msg: hello curl

If we change the string from blah to a - we'll see the following:

$ cat ~/hello.txt | curl -F-=<- localhost:2222

Result:

Content-Disposition: form-data; name="-"

So as we can see, the argument after the initial -F is the name of the form we want to submit against. The man page for curl mentions that-F` is for submitting a HTTP form where we want to specify the name:

 -F, --form <name=content>

   (HTTP)  This  lets  curl emulate a filled-in form in which a user

   has pressed the submit button. This causes curl to POST data using

   the Content-Type  multipart/form-data  according  to  RFC  2388.

   This enables uploading of binary files etc. To force the 'content'

   part to be a file,  prefix  the  file  name with  an  @  sign.

   To just get the content part from a file, prefix the file

   name with the symbol <. The difference between @ and < is then

   that @ makes a file  get  attached  in  the  post as a file upload,

   while the < makes a text field and just get the contents for that

   text field from a file.

The rest of the switches to the -F-= switch are connecting the STDIN input to this argument. <-. STDIN will contain a stream of the content coming in via the cat file |.

Comparing args - '-F-=<-' vs. -F-=<-

These 2 notations are identical. Again we can use additional verbosity to see what's happening.

$ set -x; cat ~/hello.txt | curl '-F-=<-' localhost:2222; set +x

...

+ cat /Users/smingolelli/hello.txt

+ curl '-F-=<-' localhost:2222

Whereas the other method:

$ set -x; cat ~/hello.txt | curl -F-=<- localhost:2222; set +x

...

+ cat /Users/smingolelli/hello.txt

+ curl '-F-=<-' localhost:2222

People like to use the first method because it saves them an extra character in typing it. But from curl's perspective, they're identical. All that -F-=<- is doing is escaping the redirect so that curl gets to see it instead of the shell processing it.

Original Quesiton

The original question asked about this:

$ echo foo | curl -d 'sprunge=<-' http://sprunge.us

To which I answered:

When you use the switch -d to curl you're implying a POST, from the curl man page.

-d/--data <data>

     (HTTP) Sends the specified data in a POST request to the HTTP server, 

     in the same way that a browser does  when  a user has filled in an 

     HTML form and presses the submit button. This will cause curl to pass 

     the data to the server using the content-type 

     application/x-www-form-urlencoded.  Compare to -F/--form.