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Git for Windows, Curl, Gist.vim With Vundle (1)

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Background

I installed msysgit 1.9.0, and added its bash utilities to PATH.

Problem

I attempted to open an HTML file with curl. However, I got the following error.

C:\Windows\system32\cmd.exe /c (curl 'http://www.vim.org/index.html' -o 'C:/Temp
/PortableApps/gVimPortable/Data/Temp/VIA1ED5.html')
curl: (1) Protocol "'http" not supported or disabled in libcurl
shell returned 1
Hit any key to close this window...

Discussion

In the first line of the code block, cmd.exe with option /c ran the command in the parenthesis (). I copied the command inside () and ran it in cmd.exe, and the error was reproduced.

It’s easy to find the cause of the problem. I typed “curl protocol” on the Google search web page, and the rest of the error message appeared in the list of suggestions. In the first search result, which was a Stack Overflow question, I learnt why this error occurred from the first answer—in the Command Prompt, one needs to use double quotes "" instead of single quotes ''. In Git Bash, this doesn’t matter.

Since curl was bundled with msysgit, I suspected that the installed version of Git was too old. I then upgraded it.

Lessons learnt

  1. For a shell program (e.g. Command Prompt, bash), the option -c (or /c) stands for “command”, and what’s left is the command to be run.
  2. curl will grab content from the input URL and display it as standard output. To save the downloaded content in a file, the flag -o, which means “output”, can be used.

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