Curl, the URL fetcher that can, marks 25 years of transfers

[tangor]

Daniel Stenberg has observed the 25th anniversary of the curl open source project with the publication of curl 8.0.0, the 215th release of the command line tool, and a modest tele-celebration.

The name curl, originally rendered as "cURL" to emphasize its function, stands for "Client for URLs" or "Client URL Request Library" or its recursive form, "curl URL Request Library."

For nearly 25 years I have 403'd "curl" anything. Is there a reason why to allow it?

[phranque]

it's a good reminder to the curl user to change the user agent string on the next request.

[lucy24]

t's a good reminder to the curl user to change the user agent string on the next request.

Always assuming the user is in that minute subcategory of botrunners who react to their first 403 with “Oh, hm, they don’t seem to like me, let me try changing some stuff” rather than continuing to hammer away until they’ve worked through the whole shopping list.

:: detour to logs ::

Huh. There's a glitch in a couple of the curl codes--especially 7.83 and 7.84--that causes it to insert a spurious ' (straight ' ) somewhere in the URLpath, either after a directory name or immediately before the .html. So if they weren't already getting a 403 they'd get a 404.