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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-25T21:03:12+00:00

I’ve searched for this answer but not found anything that works or that completely

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I’ve searched for this answer but not found anything that works or that completely matches my problem.

Using Unix cURL, I need to POST a key/val pair to a server. The key will be “MACs”, and the contents of a file of newline separated MAC addresses will be the VALUE for this POST.

I’ve tried:

curl -d @filename http://targetaddress.com, but when the target receives the incoming POST, the POST var is empty. (PHP is receiving).

I’ve seen other forms of curl mentioned on this site, using --url-encode which says it is not a valid option for curl on my system…

How do you POST the contents of a file as a value to a specific key in a POST using UNIX cURL?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    According to curl man page -d is the same as –data-ascii. To post the data as binary use –data-binary and to post with url encoding use –data-urlencode. So as your file is not URL encoded if you want to send it URL encoded use:

    curl --data-urlencode @file http://example.com

    If you file contains something like:

    00:0f:1f:64:7d:ff
00:0f:1f:64:7d:ff
00:0f:1f:64:7d:ff

    this will result in a POST request received something like:

    POST / HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: curl/7.19.5 (i486-pc-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.19.5 OpenSSL/0.9.8g zlib/1.2.3.3 libidn/1.15
Host: example.com
Accept: */*
Content-Length: 90
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

00%3A0f%3A1f%3A64%3A7d%3Aff%0A00%3A0f%3A1f%3A64%3A7d%3Aff%0A00%3A0f%3A1f%3A64%3A7d%3Aff%0A

    If you want to add a name you can use multipart form encoding something like:

    curl -F MACS=@file http://example.com

    or

    curl -F MACS=<file http://example.com
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