To use the curl command to search for a PDF file on a website, you can use the following command:
curl -sL "URL" | grep -o -E "href=\"[^\"]+\.pdf\"" | sed -e 's/^href="//' -e 's/"$//'
Replace "URL" with the actual URL of the webpage you want to search for PDF links. This command will retrieve the content of the webpage using curl, then use grep to find lines containing links to PDF files, and finally, sed to extract the URLs from the href attributes.
Here’s a breakdown of each part of the command:
1. `curl -sL “URL”`: This fetches the content of the specified URL. The options ` -s’ and `-L` make the output silent and follow redirects, respectively.
2. `grep -o -E “href=\” [^\”]+\.pdf\” “`: This searches for occurrences of `href=”… .pdf”` in the content fetched by `curl.` The options `-o’ make `grep` output only the matched part of the line, and `-E` enables extended regular expressions.
3. `sed -e ‘s/^href=”//’ -e ‘s/”$//”: This uses the `sed` command to remove the leading `href=”` and trailing `” ` characters from each extracted URL, leaving just the URL itself.
Please note that this command assumes that the website’s HTML structure follows the typical link pattern. Websites use different ways to structure their links, so this command needs adjustments depending on the website you are working with. Also, remember that web scraping should be done responsibly and following the website’s terms of use.