Question

I’m writing a cross-platform app that teaches people how to use the command line. I want to show them how to print out the HTML contents of a URL. Ordinarily, I would use curl for this, but Windows doesn’t come with this program, and I don’t want my users to have to install any extra programs.

Is there a way to emulate curl using built-in MS-DOS commands, perhaps sending a snippet of VBScript to wscript to be evaluated?

Answer 1

Asuming .net is installed, you can combine c# with a batch file to create a wget.cmd:

/*
@echo off && cls

if '%2'=='' (
  echo usage: %0 url filename
  goto :eof
)

set WinDirNet=%WinDir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework
IF EXIST "%WinDirNet%\v2.0.50727\csc.exe" set csc="%WinDirNet%\v2.0.50727\csc.exe"
IF EXIST "%WinDirNet%\v3.5\csc.exe" set csc="%WinDirNet%\v3.5\csc.exe"
IF EXIST "%WinDirNet%\v4.0.30319\csc.exe" set csc="%WinDirNet%\v4.0.30319\csc.exe"
%csc% /nologo /out:"%~0.exe" %0
"%~0.exe" "%1" "%2"
del "%~0.exe"
goto :eof
*/

using System;
using System.Net;
using System.IO;

class MyWget
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        WebClient wc = new WebClient();
        wc.DownloadFile(args[0],args[1]);
    }
}