Curl create a big post request

Question

I need to investigate a timeout problem on the server and need to make a large HTTP post request. Is there some easy way of creating a large HTTP post request with curl or are there some better tools out there.

curl -X POST -d {10mb random string} localhost:8080/test

Answer 1

Create a file of 10M

dd if=/dev/urandom of=output.dat  bs=1M  count=10

Then send the file using Curl

curl -X POST -d @output.dat localhost:8080/test

Is this what you are looking for?

From manpage:

-d, --data

(HTTP) Sends the specified data in a POST request to the HTTP server, in the same way that a browser does when a user has filled in an HTML form and presses the submit button. This will cause curl to pass the data to the server using the content-type application/x-www-form-urlencoded. Compare to -F, --form.

--data-raw is almost the same but does not have a special interpretation of the @ character. To post data purely binary, you should instead use the --data-binary option. To URL-encode the value of a form field you may use --data-urlencode.

If any of these options is used more than once on the same command line, the data pieces specified will be merged together with a separating &-symbol. Thus, using '-d name=daniel -d skill=lousy' would generate a post chunk that looks like 'name=daniel&skill=lousy'.

If you start the data with the letter @, the rest should be a file name to read the data from, or - if you want curl to read the data from stdin. Multiple files can also be specified. Posting data from a file named 'foobar' would thus be done with -d, --data @foobar. When --data is told to read from a file like that, carriage returns and newlines will be stripped out. If you don't want the @ character to have a special interpretation use --data-raw instead.

See also --data-binary and --data-urlencode and --data-raw. This option overrides -F, --form and -I, --head and --upload.

Answer 2

Here's how you can create a random file of ASCII test:

base64 /dev/urandom | head -c 5000 > output.txt

This creates a 5000 byte file.

Then pass it like the other answer:

curl -X POST -d @output.txt localhost:8080/test