Long: form Short: F Arg: Help: Specify HTTP multipart POST data Protocols: HTTP Mutexed: data head upload --- This lets curl emulate a filled-in form in which a user has pressed the submit button. This causes curl to POST data using the Content-Type multipart/form-data according to RFC 2388. This enables uploading of binary files etc. To force the 'content' part to be a file, prefix the file name with an @ sign. To just get the content part from a file, prefix the file name with the symbol <. The difference between @ and < is then that @ makes a file get attached in the post as a file upload, while the < makes a text field and just get the contents for that text field from a file. Example: to send an image to a server, where \&'profile' is the name of the form-field to which portrait.jpg will be the input: curl -F profile=@portrait.jpg https://example.com/upload.cgi To read content from stdin instead of a file, use - as the filename. This goes for both @ and < constructs. Unfortunately it does not support reading the file from a named pipe or similar, as it needs the full size before the transfer starts. You can also tell curl what Content-Type to use by using 'type=', in a manner similar to: curl -F "web=@index.html;type=text/html" example.com or curl -F "name=daniel;type=text/foo" example.com You can also explicitly change the name field of a file upload part by setting filename=, like this: curl -F "file=@localfile;filename=nameinpost" example.com If filename/path contains ',' or ';', it must be quoted by double-quotes like: curl -F "file=@\\"localfile\\";filename=\\"nameinpost\\"" example.com or curl -F 'file=@"localfile";filename="nameinpost"' example.com Note that if a filename/path is quoted by double-quotes, any double-quote or backslash within the filename must be escaped by backslash. See further examples and details in the MANUAL. This option can be used multiple times.