c: Copyright (C) 1998 - 2022, Daniel Stenberg, , et al. SPDX-License-Identifier: curl Short: b Long: cookie Arg: Protocols: HTTP Help: Send cookies from string/file Category: http Example: -b cookiefile $URL Example: -b cookiefile -c cookiefile $URL See-also: cookie-jar junk-session-cookies Added: 4.9 --- Pass the data to the HTTP server in the Cookie header. It is supposedly the data previously received from the server in a "Set-Cookie:" line. The data should be in the format "NAME1=VALUE1; NAME2=VALUE2". This makes curl use the cookie header with this content explicitly in all outgoing request(s). If multiple requests are done due to authentication, followed redirects or similar, they will all get this cookie passed on. If no '=' symbol is used in the argument, it is instead treated as a filename to read previously stored cookie from. This option also activates the cookie engine which will make curl record incoming cookies, which may be handy if you are using this in combination with the --location option or do multiple URL transfers on the same invoke. If the file name is exactly a minus ("-"), curl will instead read the contents from stdin. The file format of the file to read cookies from should be plain HTTP headers (Set-Cookie style) or the Netscape/Mozilla cookie file format. The file specified with --cookie is only used as input. No cookies will be written to the file. To store cookies, use the --cookie-jar option. If you use the Set-Cookie file format and do not specify a domain then the cookie is not sent since the domain will never match. To address this, set a domain in Set-Cookie line (doing that will include sub-domains) or preferably: use the Netscape format. This option can be used multiple times. Users often want to both read cookies from a file and write updated cookies back to a file, so using both --cookie and --cookie-jar in the same command line is common.