Question

If I try to pass a URL to curl that contains brackets, it fails with an error:

$ curl 'http://www.google.com/?TEST[]=1'
curl: (3) [globbing] illegal character in range specification at pos 29

However, if I escape both brackets, it appears to work:

$ curl 'http://www.google.com/?TEST\[\]=1'

How do I fix this? Is there an argument that will escape URLs automatically, or a description of the characters that need to be escaped before passing to curl?

Answer 1

Add -g to your command:

-g, --globoff
      This option switches off the "URL globbing parser". When you set this option, you can
      specify URLs that contain the letters {}[] without having curl itself interpret them.
      Note that these letters are not normal legal URL contents but they should be encoded
      according to the URI standard.

      Example:
       curl -g "https://example.com/{[]}}}}"

curl.se/docs/manpage.html#-g