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 "<?xml version="1.0"?>...." http://www.foo.com/
I use this method for testing almost every day. Saves a lot of time.
Another curl command I use often is:
curl -I http://www.example.com/
to get a HEAD request.
And:
curl --header "Accept-Encoding: gzip" http://www.foo.com/ | gunzip
to get the compressed request, or to verify that the request is compressed:
curl -I -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate" http://www.foo.com/
You can also pipe the resulting page to vim, using:
curl http://www.foo.com/ | vim -
use:
curl -i http://www.foo.com/ | vim -
to also view the headers.