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Weird problems with ‘curl -d’ and lighttpd

November 6, 2008 on 12:41 am | In Linux | 1 Comment

I’m trying to test a Google Checkout response handler for a project I’m working on. Rather than putting through sandbox orders I’m just trying to post a message using Curl but for some reason POSTing anything longer than about a kilobyte just doesn’t show up at the server, running lighttpd 1.4. Enabling some debugging showed that curl is sending an HTTP 100 header.

User-Agent: curl/7.18.0 (i486-pc-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.18.0 OpenSSL/0.9.8g zlib/1.2.3.3 libidn/1.1
Host: asap
Accept: */*
Content-Length: 1116
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Expect: 100-continue

There’s a bug in lighttpd 1.4 which means that this ‘Expect’ header is not handled properly. It won’t be fixed in v1.4 either.

The quick workaround for this bug is to call curl with the option “-H ‘Expect: ‘” to disable the header.

By the way, I also didn’t know how to post a file of data with curl – the answer is

curl -d ‘@file.xml’