| c: Copyright (C) Daniel Stenberg, <daniel@haxx.se>, et al. |
| SPDX-License-Identifier: curl |
| Short: b |
| Long: cookie |
| Arg: <data|filename> |
| Protocols: HTTP |
| Help: Send cookies from string/file |
| Category: http |
| Example: -b cookiefile $URL |
| Example: -b cookiefile -c cookiefile $URL |
| See-also: cookie-jar junk-session-cookies |
| Added: 4.9 |
| Multi: append |
| --- |
| Pass the data to the HTTP server in the Cookie header. It is supposedly the |
| data previously received from the server in a "Set-Cookie:" line. The data |
| should be in the format "NAME1=VALUE1; NAME2=VALUE2". This makes curl use the |
| cookie header with this content explicitly in all outgoing request(s). If |
| multiple requests are done due to authentication, followed redirects or |
| similar, they all get this cookie passed on. |
| |
| If no '=' symbol is used in the argument, it is instead treated as a filename |
| to read previously stored cookie from. This option also activates the cookie |
| engine which makes curl record incoming cookies, which may be handy if you are |
| using this in combination with the --location option or do multiple URL |
| transfers on the same invoke. If the file name is exactly a minus ("-"), curl |
| instead reads the contents from stdin. |
| |
| The file format of the file to read cookies from should be plain HTTP headers |
| (Set-Cookie style) or the Netscape/Mozilla cookie file format. |
| |
| The file specified with --cookie is only used as input. No cookies are written |
| to the file. To store cookies, use the --cookie-jar option. |
| |
| If you use the Set-Cookie file format and do not specify a domain then the |
| cookie is not sent since the domain never matches. To address this, set a |
| domain in Set-Cookie line (doing that includes subdomains) or preferably: use |
| the Netscape format. |
| |
| Users often want to both read cookies from a file and write updated cookies |
| back to a file, so using both --cookie and --cookie-jar in the same command |
| line is common. |
