Have you ever wanted to quickly send a POST request to a HTTP server? It's pretty easy to do using curl.

For example to send XML via a POST request, you could use the following:

curl --header "Content-Type: text/xml" --data "…." http://www.foo.com/

I use this method for testing almost every day. Saves a lot time.

There's a tip entry in the wiki too.

[@693]

Another curl command I use often is:

curl -I http://www.example.com/

to get a HEAD request.

[@699]

And:

curl --header "Accept-Encoding: gzip" http://www.foo.com/ | gunzip

to get the compressed request.