How to use curl to download content from sourceforge

curl

Simply typing http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/romfs/genromfs/0.5.2/genromfs-0.5.2.tar.gz works fine on a browser, but I'm trying to download from a CLI environment with limited utilities.

The following just returns an empty file:

curl http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/romfs/genromfs/0.5.2/genromfs-0.5.2.tar.gz

How do I get genromfs-0.5.2.tar.gz from sourceforge using curl?

You can do

curl -L  http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/romfs/genromfs/0.5.2/genromfs-0.5.2.tar.gz > genromfs.tar.gz

to download the file.

The -L tells curl to follow any redirects, which sourceforge normally does.

If wget is available, that would be far simpler.

Update: This has been implemented in curl 7.19.0. See @Besworks answer.

According to the man page there is no way to keep the original file name except using multiple O´s. Alternatively you could use your own file names:

curl http://{one,two}.site.com -o "file_#1.txt"

resulting in http://one.site.com being saved to file_one.txt and http://two.site.com being saved to file_two.txt.

or even multiple variables like

curl http://{site,host}.host[1-5].com -o "#1_#2"

resulting in http://site.host1.com being saved to site_1, http://host.host1.com being saved to host_1 and so on.