VMware ESX 4 – use cURL to grab files

I need to quickly download an ISO image to my new VMware ESX 4 box and discovered that the cURL utility is now included — pretty handy.

If you have not used cURL, it is similar to wget.  However, with no parameters cURL will spew the download to standard out — definitely not what you want in the case of an ISO image.  Therefore, the -O option — capital O — can be used to save the downloaded file, preserving the filename.  If you happen to be behind a proxy server, don’t forget to set the http_proxy environment variable — standard Linux procedure.

The full man page is also present — if you need to know more, just type “man curl”.

Related posts:

1. Easy recovery from a full VMware ESX datastore
2. If you build it…
3. VMware ESX 4 can even virtualize itself
4. Using SCVMM to attach ISO images to VMware ESX VMs
5. Which guest operating systems can be customized by SCVMM?