cURL Command Line Internet Client
Web’s More Important Library and Command Tool
cURL is the name of a software library used by pretty much every single program on the planet that access any Internet service. It is the most significant software package of its kind. It is also the name of the curl utility command that comes with the library. The curl command comes on most all systems by default these days.
Why not wget?
Curl is far more powerful for most use cases involving interacting with any Internet application layer protocol. The wget tool is specifically for use on the Web and can crawl and download entire sites, but its use within scripts is hindered by its lack of clean support for dealing directly with the HTTP protocol making it less useful overall. It’s better to only learn curl until you might need a tool to do what curl can’t.