CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE(3) curl_easy_setopt options CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE(3)
NAME
CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE - file name to read cookies from
SYNOPSIS
#include <curl/curl.h>
CURLcode curl_easy_setopt(CURL *handle, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, char *filename);
DESCRIPTION
Pass a pointer to a null-terminated string as parameter. It should
point to the file name of your file holding cookie data to read. The
cookie data can be in either the old Netscape / Mozilla cookie data
format or just regular HTTP headers (Set-Cookie style) dumped to a
file.
It also enables the cookie engine, making libcurl parse and send cook-
ies on subsequent requests with this handle.
Given an empty or non-existing file or by passing the empty string ("")
to this option, you can enable the cookie engine without reading any
initial cookies. If you tell libcurl the file name is "-" (just a sin-
gle minus sign), libcurl will instead read from stdin.
This option only reads cookies. To make libcurl write cookies to file,
see CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR(3).
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-do-
mains) or preferably: use the Netscape format.
If you use this option multiple times, you just add more files to read.
Subsequent files will add more cookies.
The application does not have to keep the string around after setting
this option.
Setting this option to NULL will (since 7.77.0) explicitly disable the
cookie engine and clear the list of files to read cookies from.
DEFAULT
NULL
PROTOCOLS
HTTP
EXAMPLE
CURL *curl = curl_easy_init();
if(curl) {
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_URL, "https://example.com/foo.bin");
/* get cookies from an existing file */
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, "/tmp/cookies.txt");
ret = curl_easy_perform(curl);
curl_easy_cleanup(curl);
}
Cookie file format
The cookie file format and general cookie concepts in curl are de-
scribed in the HTTP-COOKIES.md file, also hosted online here:
https://curl.se/docs/http-cookies.html
AVAILABILITY
As long as HTTP is supported
RETURN VALUE
Returns CURLE_OK if HTTP is supported, and CURLE_UNKNOWN_OPTION if not.
SEE ALSO
CURLOPT_COOKIE(3), CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR(3),
libcurl 7.81.0 November 26, 2021 CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE(3)
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