Send HTTP request with parameters file

Question

My question is very simple : is it possible to send a HTTP request from the *nix command line specifying a file, containing all the parameters, as an argument?

In REST APIs documentation, we often see that kind of specification

POST /oauth/token HTTP/1.1
Host: api.example.com
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

grant_type=password
  &client_id=<API_KEY>
  &client_secret=<API_SECRET>
  &username=<USER_USERNAME>
  &password=<USER_PASSWORD>

To avoid command lines that are very long and uneasy to edit, is it possible to put these informations in a file, in the above-mentioned format (which seems pretty standard) ? Ideally something with curl that would look like

curl --input-file myparameters.txt

I could not find such feature in curl documentation. Maybe with another command line tool? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

If you're doing it from the UNIX command line, I dont' see why it wouldn't be so difficult to create a script which essentially parses your text input and then converts it into something that curl can use at the CLI. For instance, if a line starts with 'HOST' you can use sed to create a string which represents the hostname at the end of a line which represents curl program input. The same goes for the rest.

Else, why don't you try just writing a simple client/wrapper program/script yourself? It's not that difficult, just tedious and you can always ask back here for more help (I did something similar a long while ago to test firewall setup).

http://alternativeto.net/software/curl/