List options

curl has more than two hundred command-line options and the number of options keep increasing over time. Chances are the number of options will reach 250 within a few years.

To find out which options you need to perform as certain action, you can get curl to list them. First, curl --help or simply curl -h will get you a list of the most important and frequently used options. You can then provide an additional "category" to -h to get more options listed for that specific area. Use curl -h category to list all existing categories or curl -h all to list all available options.

Before curl 7.73.0, the help category system didn't exist and then curl --help or simply curl -h would simply list all existing options in alphabetical order with a brief explanation next to each.

The curl --manual option outputs the entire man page for curl. That is a thorough and complete document on how each option works amassing several thousand lines of documentation. To wade through that is also a tedious work and we encourage use of a search function through those text masses. Some people will appreciate the man page in its web version.