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[_] Why can't I use curl to download a file?

Dan Brickley danbri at danbri.org
Thu Sep 7 10:52:30 BST 2006

Joel wrote:

> Hi Stefan,
> I've 'only' got Cygwin on my XP machine here but that command worked
> for me and it downloaded gnupg fine.
>
> Dave mentioned that passive FTP might be an option i.e. maybe your
> firewall is getting in the way. It works for FF as FF is automatically
> (or uses by default) passive FTP.
>
> Digging around further it also appears that FTP sites themselves can
> be configured to only accept passive (rather than active FTP), well,
> didn't know that!
>
> The amended command syntax for curl to use passive FTP would be:
> curl -O --ftp-pasv <FTP filename>

That was my theory too, but I searched around, and CURL is supposed to
default to attemping passive FTP first...

Dan