Curl scrables accented characters

It seems the difference has to do with the Content-Length header and how it is treated by both commands.

But before going into that, curl -X HEAD does not give any output because, by default, curl does not print headers if switch -i is not provided (not needed on -I though).

In any case, curl -I is the proper way to fetch the headers. It just ask for the header and close the connection.

On the other hand curl -X HEAD -i will wait for the transmission of the number of bytes stated by Content-Length. In the case no Content-Length is not specified, I guess it will wait for some data or for that particular header.

Some examples that shows this behaviour:

$ curl -X HEAD -i http://www.elpais.es
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: AkamaiGHost
Content-Length: 0
Location: http://www.elpais.com/
Date: Wed, 12 May 2010 06:35:57 GMT
Connection: keep-alive

Because Content-Length is 0, in this case both commands behave the same. And the connection is closed afterwards.

$ curl -X HEAD -i http://slashdot.org
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache/1.3.41 (Unix) mod_perl/1.31-rc4
SLASH_LOG_DATA: shtml
X-Powered-By: Slash 2.005001296
X-Bender: Since I love you all so much, I'd like to give everyone hugs.
X-XRDS-Location: http://slashdot.org/slashdot.xrds
Cache-Control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Length: 115224
Date: Wed, 12 May 2010 06:37:20 GMT
X-Varnish: 1649060825 1649060810
Age: 1
Connection: keep-alive

curl: (18) transfer closed with 115224 bytes remaining to read

In this case, there seems to be a timeout (probably by Varnish), so curl protests that the connection was closed before having received the Content-Length number of bytes.

By the way, look at the funny X-Bender (shown in the example) and X-Fry (try it for yourself) headers :).

Using bash:

Just to see my files:

$ ls
café.txt

Check the hex bytes of the file name (note: mine may be different... mine are probably UTF-8 encoded):

$ echo * | hexdump -C
00000000  63 61 66 c3 a9 2e 74 78  74 0a                    |caf...txt.|
0000000a

Then craft a file name using the hex codes for the parts that aren't found on your keyboard:

$ ls $'caf\xc3\xa9.txt'
café.txt

In bash, $' ... ' will expand escapes (much like "echo -e" does). And \x followed by a 2 digit hex code will replace it with that character.

And I don't see anything wrong with an:

ls caf*.txt

followed by a

mv caf*.txt cafe.txt

But if for some reason that would match multiple files, you can use the hex stuff:

ls $'caf\xc3\xa9.txt'
mv $'caf\xc3\xa9.txt' café.txt