How can I send a file's contents as a POST parameter using cURL?

Question

I'm trying to use cURL to POST the contents of a file, as if I'd pasted that contents in to an html textarea. That's to say I don't want to upload the file, I just want a post parameter called foo to be filled with text from a file called bar.txt. bar.txt's contents may include newlines, quotes, and so on.

Is this possible?

Thanks.

Edit: I found out how to do it in the end:

curl --data-urlencode "[email protected]" http://example.com/index.php

This will take the contents of the file bar.txt, url encode it, place the resultant string in a parameter called foo in a POST request of http://example.com/index.php.

I can't speak to whether the solutions others have suggested will work or not, but the one above seems like the best way.

Answer 1

You can by doing something like:

$ curl --data "foo:$(cat foo.txt)" http://localhost/yourfile.php

Note that you'll probably want to encode the file, as cacheguard said. To encode it in base64, just modify the previous command like this:

$ curl --data "foo:$(cat foo.txt | base64)" http://localhost/yourfile.php