[9] It was originally named httpget and then became urlget before adopting the current name of curl[10][11] The original author and lead developer is the Swedish developer Daniel Stenberg, who created curl because he wanted to automate the fetching of currency exchange rates for IRC users.

The library supports the file URI scheme, SFTP, Telnet, TFTP, file transfer resume, FTP uploading, HTTP form-based upload, HTTPS certificates, LDAPS, proxies, and user-plus-password authentication.

[14] The libcurl library is portable, as it builds and works identically on most platforms, including AIX, AmigaOS, Android,[citation needed] BeOS, BlackBerry Tablet OS and BlackBerry 10,[15] OpenVMS, Darwin, DOS, FreeBSD, HP-UX, HURD, iOS, IRIX, Linux, macOS, NetBSD, NetWare, OpenBSD, OS/2, QNX Neutrino, RISC OS, Solaris, Symbian, Tru64, Ultrix, UnixWare, Microsoft Windows and OpenHarmony.

[19] The libcurl library supports GnuTLS, mbed TLS, NSS, gskit on IBM i, SChannel on Windows, Secure Transport on macOS and iOS, SSL/TLS through OpenSSL, BoringSSL, libreSSL, AmiSSL, wolfSSL, BearSSL and rustls.

So running the command above, on most systems, displays the HTML contents of www.example.com in plain text on the active terminal window.