How to call cURL without using server-side cache?

Question

Is there a way to tell cURL command not to use server's side cache? e.g; I have this curl command:

curl -v www.example.com

How can I ask curl to send a fresh request to not use the cache?

Note: I am looking for an executable command in the terminal.

Answer 1

I know this is an older question, but I wanted to post an answer for users with the same question:

curl -H 'Cache-Control: no-cache' http://www.example.com

This curl command servers in its header request to return non-cached data from the web server.

Answer 2

The -H 'Cache-Control: no-cache' argument is not guaranteed to work because the remote server or any proxy layers in between can ignore it. If it doesn't work, you can do it the old-fashioned way, by adding a unique querystring parameter. Usually, the servers/proxies will think it's a unique URL and not use the cache.

curl "http://www.example.com?foo123"

You have to use a different querystring value every time, though. Otherwise, the server/proxies will match the cache again. To automatically generate a different querystring parameter every time, you can use date +%s, which will return the seconds since epoch.

curl "http://www.example.com?$(date +%s)"