How to send line break with curl?

Question

I\'ve tried the following to send a line break with curl, but \\n is not interpreted by curl.

curl -X PUT -d \"my message\\n\" http://localhost:         


        

Answer 1

Your shell is passing \ followed by n rather than a newline to curl rather than "my message\n". Bash has support for another string syntax that supports escape sequences like \n and \t. To use it, start the string with $' and end the string with ':

curl -X PUT -d $'my message\n' http://localhost:8000/hello

See ANSI-C Quoting in the Bash Reference Manual

Answer 2

The solution for someone who doesn't want to use files, and doesn't want to resort to shell escaping magic is:

curl -X POST --data-binary @- http://url.com <<EOF
line one
line two
EOF

But this is literal newlines in the post data payload, and not in form fields.

Answer 3

A very easy way, just Shift-Enter in the console for the break. Very readable typing it in too.

curl -d "line1
line2" http-echo.com

Server gets this: line1\nline2

Do this to remove the line break:

curl -d "line1 \
line2" http-echo.com

Server gets this: line1 line2