As mentioned above, curl supports hundreds of command-line options and it also supports an unlimited number of URLs. If your shell or command-line system supports it, there's really no limit to how long a command line you can pass to curl.
curl will parse the entire command line first, apply the wishes from the command-line options used, and then go over the URLs one by one (in a left to right order) to perform the operations.
For some options (for example -o or -O that tell curl where to store the
transfer), you may want to specify one option for each URL on the command
line.
curl will return an exit code for its operation on the last URL used. If you
instead rather want curl to exit with an error on the first URL in the set
that fails, use the --fail-early option.
In previous sections we described how curl always parses all options in the whole command line and applies those to all the URLs that it transfers.
That was a simplification: curl also offers an option (-:, --next) that
inserts a boundary between a set of options and URLs for which it will apply
the options. When the command-line parser finds a --next option, it applies
the following options to the next set of URLs. The --next option thus works
as a divider between a set of options and URLs. You can use as many --next
options as you please.
As an example, we do an HTTP GET to a URL and follow redirects, we then make a second HTTP POST to a different URL and we round it up with a HEAD request to a third URL. All in a single command line:
curl --location http://example.com/1 --next
--data sendthis http://example.com/2 --next
--head http://example.com/3
Trying something like that without the --next options on the command line
would generate an illegal command line since curl would attempt to combine
both a POST and a HEAD:
Warning: You can only select one HTTP request method! You asked for both POST
Warning: (-d, --data) and HEAD (-I, --head).