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.