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Long: form
Short: F
Arg: <name=content>
Help: Specify multipart MIME data
Protocols: HTTP SMTP IMAP
Mutexed: data head upload
---
For HTTP protocol family, this lets curl emulate a filled-in form in which a
user has pressed the submit button. This causes curl to POST data using the
Content-Type multipart/form-data according to RFC 2388.

For SMTP and IMAP protocols, this is the mean to compose a multipart mail
message to transmit.

This enables uploading of binary
files etc. To force the 'content' part to be a file, prefix the file name with
an @ sign. To just get the content part from a file, prefix the file name with
the symbol <. The difference between @ and < is then that @ makes a file get
attached in the post as a file upload, while the < makes a text field and just
get the contents for that text field from a file.

Example: to send an image to an HTTP server, where \&'profile' is the name of
the form-field to which portrait.jpg will be the input:

 curl -F profile=@portrait.jpg https://example.com/upload.cgi

To read content from stdin instead of a file, use - as the filename. This goes
for both @ and < constructs. For this case, as well as for others in which the
full data size cannot be determined before the transfer starts (as named pipes
or similar), data is transferred as chunks by HTTP and rejected by IMAP.

You can also tell curl what Content-Type to use by using 'type=', in a manner
similar to:

 curl -F "web=@index.html;type=text/html" example.com

or

 curl -F "name=daniel;type=text/foo" example.com

You can also explicitly change the name field of a file upload part by setting
filename=, like this:

 curl -F "file=@localfile;filename=nameinpost" example.com

If filename/path contains ',' or ';', it must be quoted by double-quotes like:

 curl -F "file=@\\"localfile\\";filename=\\"nameinpost\\"" example.com

or

 curl -F 'file=@"localfile";filename="nameinpost"' example.com

Note that if a filename/path is quoted by double-quotes, any double-quote
or backslash within the filename must be escaped by backslash.

You can add custom headers to the field by setting headers=, like

  curl -F "submit=OK;headers=\\"X-submit-type: OK\\"" example.com

or

  curl -F "submit=OK;headers=@headerfile" example.com

The headers= keyword may appear more that once and above notes about quoting
apply. When headers are read from a file, Empty lines and lines starting
with '#' are comments and ignored; each header can be folded by splitting
between two words and starting the continuation line with a space; embedded
carriage-returns and trailing spaces are stripped.
Here is an example of a header file contents:

  # This file contain two headers.
.br
  X-header-1: this is a header

  # The following header is folded.
.br
  X-header-2: this is
.br
   another header


To support sending multipart mail messages, the syntax is extended as follows:
.br
- name can be omitted: the equal sign is the first character of the argument,
.br
- if data starts with '(', this signals to start a new multipart: it can be
followed by a content type specification.
.br
- a multipart can be terminated with a '=)' argument.

Example: the following command sends an SMTP mime e-mail consisting in an
inline part in two alternative formats: plain text and HTML. It attaches a
text file:

 curl -F '=(;type=multipart/alternative' \\
.br
         -F '=plain text message' \\
.br
         -F '= <body>HTML message</body>;type=text/html' \\
.br
      -F '=)' -F '=@textfile.txt' ...  smtp://example.com

Data can be encoded for transfer using encoder=. Available encodings are
\fIbinary\fP and \fI8bit\fP that do nothing else than adding the corresponding
Content-Transfer-Encoding header, \fI7bit\fP that only rejects 8-bit characters
with a transfer error, \fIquoted-printable\fP and \fIbase64\fP that encodes
data according to the corresponding schemes, limiting lines length to
76 characters.

Example: send multipart mail with a quoted-printable text message and a
base64 attached file:

 curl -F '=text message;encoder=quoted-printable' \\
.br
      -F '=@localfile;encoder=base64' ... smtp://example.com

See further examples and details in the MANUAL.

This option can be used multiple times.