How do you print received cookie info to stdout with curl?

Question

How do you print received cookie info to stdout with curl?

According to the man pages if you use '-' as the file name for the -c --cookie-jar option it should print the cookie to stdout. The problem is I get an error:

curl: option -: is unknown 

an example of the command I am running:

curl -c --cookie-jar - 'http://google.com' 

Answer 1

You get that error because you use in the wrong way that option. When you see in a man page an option like:

-c, --cookie-jar <file name> 

this mean that if you want to use that option, you must to use -c OR --cookie-jar, never both! These two are equivalent and, in fact, -c is the abbreviated form for --cookie-jar. There are many, many options in man pages which are designed in the same way.

In your case:

curl -c - 'http://google.com' 

--cookie-jar is given as argument for -c option, so, it's interpreted as a file name, not like an option (as you may think), and - remains alone which leads to error because curl, indeed, doesn't have such an option.