Use curl.exe to download a file with windows

curl.exe is a native tools in windows
Warning : curl is a powershell alias is different with curl.exe tools

Downloading a File

To download a file, you can use the -O option to keep the original file name, or -o to specify a different file name.

curl.exe -O https://example.com/file.txt

This downloads file.txt to the current directory, keeping its original name.

If you want to specify a different file name:

curl.exe -o myfile.txt https://example.com/file.txt

Directory Listing (Exploring a Directory)

If the server allows directory indexing (e.g., on an Apache server), you can use curl to get a directory listing.

curl.exe https://example.com/folder/

This will display the contents of the directory if it’s accessible. Note that not all servers allow directory listing.

Recursive Mode (Downloading Files by Following Links)

curl does not natively support recursive downloading like wget, but you can download a file of links and process them with a script. For example, if you have an index.html file with links to files in a directory, you could do something like this:

curl.exe -O https://example.com/folder/index.html
curl.exe -K index.html

Note: Since curl doesn’t support true recursive mode, consider using wget for such cases, or write a script to read and download each link.

Downloading a Full Folder

If a folder isn’t archived (e.g., as a .zip file), downloading it with curl alone is limited. If the server provides a .zip archive of the folder, you can download it as follows:

curl.exe -O https://example.com/folder/archive.zip

For cases where files are listed individually, you would need to download each file separately or use a script to automate this.

Error Handling (e.g., Handling 404 Errors)

curl can return HTTP status codes, which you can use to handle errors. The -w option allows you to capture the HTTP status code and perform specific actions based on it.

curl.exe -o file.txt -w "%{http_code}" -s https://example.com/file.txt

The status code will display after the download completes. If the file doesn’t exist (404 error), you can add a condition in a Windows batch script to handle it:

set URL=https://example.com/file.txt
curl.exe -o file.txt -w "%%{http_code}" -s %URL% > status.txt
set /p status=<status.txt

if %status%==404 (
    echo "Error 404: File not found"
) else (
    echo "Download successful"
)