Curl to grab remote filename after following location

The remote side sends the filename using the Content-Disposition header.

curl 7.21.2 or newer does this automatically if you specify --remote-header-name / -J.

curl -O -J -L $url

If you have a recent version of curl (7.21.2 or later), see @jmanning2k's answer.

I you have an older version of curl (like 7.19.7 which came with Snow Leopard), do two requests: a HEAD to get the file name from response header, then a GET:

url="http://www.vim.org/scripts/download_script.php?src_id=10872"
filename=$(curl -sI  $url | grep -o -E 'filename=.*$' | sed -e 's/filename=//')
curl -o $filename -L $url

If you can use wget instead of curl:

wget --content-disposition $url

I wanted to comment to jmanning2k's answer but as a new user I can't, so I tried to edit his post which is allowed but the edit was rejected saying it was supposed to be a comment. sigh

Anyway, see this as a comment to his answer thanks.

This seems to only work if the header looks like filename=pythoncomplete.vim as in the example, but some sites send a header that looks like filename*=UTF-8' 'filename.zip' that one isn't recognized by curl 7.28.0

I wanted a solution that worked on both older and newer Macs, and the legacy code David provided for Snow Leopard did not behave well under Mavericks. Here's a function I created based on David's code:

function getUriFilename() {
    header="$(curl -sI "$1" | tr -d '\r')"

    filename="$(echo "$header" | grep -o -E 'filename=.*$')"
    if [[ -n "$filename" ]]; then
        echo "${filename#filename=}"
        return
    fi

    filename="$(echo "$header" | grep -o -E 'Location:.*$')"
    if [[ -n "$filename" ]]; then
        basename "${filename#Location\:}"
        return
    fi

    return 1
}

With this defined, you can run:

url="http://www.vim.org/scripts/download_script.php?src_id=10872"
filename="$(getUriFilename $url)"
curl -L $url -o "$filename"

Curl to grab remote filename after following location

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