curl 302 redirect not working (command line)

Question

In the browser, navigating to this URL initiates a 302 (moved temporarily) request which in turn downloads a file.

http://www.targetsite.com/target.php/?event=download&task_id=123

When I view what is actually happening via Chrome network tools I see that the redirect is going to a dynamically generated path that cancels itself immediately after download. In other words, even if I know that full path I will not have time to manually call it.

So, how in using the command line can I mimic the browser actions?

I tried

curl --cookies bin/cookies.txt -O -L "http://www.targetsite.com/target.php/?event=download&task_id=123" --compressed

but this just returns gibberish. The goal of this is to programmatically download this file without having to navigate to the site. Unfortunately I cannot share the site here as it is behind a log-in.

Answer 1

You need to supply the -L or --location option in order to enable curl to follow HTTP redirects.

Quoting from man curl:

   -L, --location
          (HTTP/HTTPS)  If  the server reports that the requested page has
          moved to a different location (indicated with a Location: header
          and  a  3XX  response code), this option will make curl redo the
          request on the new place. If used together with -i, --include or
          -I, --head, headers from all requested pages will be shown. When
          authentication is used, curl only sends its credentials  to  the
          initial  host.  If a redirect takes curl to a different host, it
          won't be able to intercept the user+password. See  also  --loca‐
          tion-trusted  on how to change this. You can limit the amount of
          redirects to follow by using the --max-redirs option.

          When curl follows a redirect and the request is not a plain  GET
          (for example POST or PUT), it will do the following request with
          a GET if the HTTP response was 301, 302, or 303. If the response
          code  was  any  other  3xx code, curl will re-send the following
          request using the same unmodified method.