Question

In Linux how can I fetch an URL and get its contents in a variable in shell script?

Answer 1

You can use wget command to download the page and read it into a variable as:

content=$(wget google.com -q -O -)
echo $content

We use the -O option of wget which allows us to specify the name of the file into which wget dumps the page contents. We specify - to get the dump onto standard output and collect that into the variable content. You can add the -q quiet option to turn off’s wget output.

You can use the curl command for this aswell as:

content=$(curl -L google.com)
echo $content

We need to use the -L option as the page we are requesting might have moved. In which case we need to get the page from the new location. The -L or --location option helps us with this.