Question

If the HTTP response body for a curl request doesn’t contain a trailing newline, I end up with this really annoying condition where the shell prompt is in the middle of the line, and escaping is messed up enough that when I put the last curl command on the screen, deleting characters from that curl command deletes the wrong characters.

For example:

[root@localhost ~]# curl jsonip.com
{"ip":"10.10.10.10","about":"/about"}[root@localhost ~]#

Is there a trick I can use to automatically add a newline at the end of a curl response, to get the prompt back on the left edge of the screen?

Answer 1

From the man file:

To better allow script programmers to get to know about the progress of
curl, the -w/–write-out option was introduced. Using this, you can specify
what information from the previous transfer you want to extract.

To display the amount of bytes downloaded together with some text and an
ending newline:

curl -w 'We downloaded %{size_download} bytes\n' www.download.com

So try adding the following to your ~/.curlrc file:

-w "\n"