curl HTTP post

[razalas]

Not sure if this is the best forum to post this, but hopefully somebody here might be able to point me in the right direction.

I am trying to POST an HTTP request to a business partner's web site using the Linux curl command, but I am having trouble sending all my content. They want the message formatted as a MIME message (Content-type: multipart/mixed), but I am beginning to wonder if I can to do this with curl. From the man page and what I can find on the web, I should be able to format the necessary headers, but curl doesn't seem to want to include all the data I am trying to send.

The message I am trying to POST is supposed to follow the format shown below:

Content-type: multipart/mixed; boundary=BOUNDARY
Content-length: nnnn

--BOUNDARY
Content-type: application/x-[URL unfurl="true"]www-form-urlencoded[/URL]
Content-length: nnn

Parm1=Data1&Parm2=Data2&Parm3=...

--BOUNDARY
Content-type: application/x-appl-specific-type
Content-length: nnnn

<bunch of binary data>

--BOUNDARY--

I have everything after the first Content-length header in a file, lets call it "my-bin-file" for this example. My curl command is coded as follows:

curl --include --header "Content-type: multipart/mixed; boundary=BOUNDARY" --header "Content-length: 1493" --data-binary @my-bin-file --output my-output-file [URL unfurl="true"]https://www.my-business-partner.com/incoming[/URL]

Running on RHEL: "User-Agent: curl/7.12.1 (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.12.1"

The contents of my-bin-file do not appear to be getting included in the post. I get back a properly formatted response indicating the my POST was missing data. From what I can see curl is only including the first 15 bytes from my-bin-file, which doesn't make any sense to me.


Code what you mean,
and mean what you code!
But by all means post your code!

Razalas

 

[razalas]

Just in case anybody is interested, it seems like my problem was due to trying to append data using multiple --data-binary parameters. According to the man page, multiples of --data-binary should append data. I actually had three: one for everything up to the "binary data", one for the "binary data", and one for everything else. I changed to catentate all three pieces into a single file and then passed that single file using only one --data-binary and now it appears to be working correctly (or at least the site I POST'ing to, seems to recognize my message).

curl --version
curl 7.12.1 (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.12.1 OpenSSL/0.9.7a zlib/1.2.1.2 libidn/0.5.6
Protocols: ftp gopher telnet dict ldap http file https ftps
Features: GSS-Negotiate IDN IPv6 Largefile NTLM SSL libz

Code what you mean,
and mean what you code!
But by all means post your code!

Razalas

 

[SamBones]

I don't have any experience using "[tt]curl[/tt]", but I've had some success doing this using "[tt]wget[/tt]". It can POST either a string or the contents of a file. Look for the command line options "[tt]--post-data[/tt]" and "[tt]--post-file[/tt]". You also have full control of headers and cookies being sent with the POST.