Send request to cURL with post data sourced from a file

You're looking for the --data-binary argument:

curl -i -X POST host:port/post-file \
  -H "Content-Type: text/xml" \
  --data-binary "@path/to/file"

In the example above, -i prints out all the headers so that you can see what's going on, and -X POST makes it explicit that this is a post. Both of these can be safely omitted without changing the behaviour on the wire. The path to the file needs to be preceded by an @ symbol, so curl knows to read from a file.

I need to make a POST request via Curl from the command line. Data for this request is located in a file...

All you need to do is have the --data argument start with a @:

curl -H "Content-Type: text/xml" --data "@path_of_file" host:port/post-file-path

For example, if you have the data in a file called stuff.xml then you would do something like:

curl -H "Content-Type: text/xml" --data "@stuff.xml" host:port/post-file-path

The stuff.xml filename can be replaced with a relative or full path to the file: @../xml/stuff.xml, @/var/tmp/stuff.xml, ...