The Full Form of CURL is Client URL Request Library.

cURL (pronounced ‘curl’) is a computer software project providing a library (libcurl) and command-line tool (curl) for transferring data using various network protocols. The name stands for “Client URL”, which was first released in 1997

cURL was first released in 1997. It was originally named httpget and then became urlget before adopting the current name of cURL. 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.

libcurl is a free client-side URL transfer library,supporting cookies, DICT, FTP, FTPS, Gopher, HTTP/1(with HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 support), HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, HTTP proxy tunneling, HTTPS, IMAP, Kerberos, LDAP, MQTT, POP3, RTSP, RTMP, SCP, SMTP, and SMB. 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.

The libcurl library is portable. It builds and works identically on many platforms, including AIX, AmigaOS, Android, BeOS, BlackBerry Tablet OS and BlackBerry 10,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, and Microsoft Windows.

The libcurl library is free, thread-safe and IPv6 compatible. Bindings are available for more than 40 languages, including C/C++, Java, PHP and Python. The Ring programming language includes libcurl in the standard library.

The libcurl library can support axTLS, GnuTLS, mbed TLS, NSS, QSOSSL on IBM i, SChannel on Windows, Secure Transport on macOS and iOS, SSL/TLS through OpenSSL, and wolfSSL.