ChapGPT / CoPoliot Video "15 Surprising Examples" that are good for developers

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At 1:54 in the Video is “Explain Command Line Parameters”

For example on Hub we have a topic Libcurl FAQ with this curl example:

curl -u jsmith:jsmith -X POST -F "environment=TEM" -F "filename=Test" -F "[email protected]" "https://server.com/api/manifests"

Normally I would go find the Curl help and lookup each parameter. That takes a lot of time to understand the parameters one at a time, and can be tedious as I record notes about each one.

In CoPilot I enter:
Explain command curl -u jsmith:jsmith -X POST -F "environment=TEM" -F "filename=Test" -F "[email protected]" "https://server.com/api/manifests"

The reply is below and nicely pastes here as MarkDown:

Copilot

Sent by Copilot:

Sure! Here’s a breakdown of the curl command you provided:

curl -u jsmith:jsmith -X POST -F "environment=TEM" -F "filename=Test" -F "[email protected]" "https://server.com/api/manifests"

Explanation:

  • curl: The command-line tool for transferring data with URLs.
  • -u jsmith:jsmith: This option specifies the username and password for server authentication.
  • -X POST: This tells curl to use the POST method.
  • -F "environment=TEM": This sends the form field environment with the value TEM.
  • -F "filename=Test": This sends the form field filename with the value Test.
  • -F "[email protected]": This uploads the file mmabc.manifest as the form field multipartFile.
  • "https://server.com/api/manifests": The URL to which the request is sent.

Is there anything specific you’d like to know or modify about this command?

Another example on that Libcurl FAQ topic is interesting in that the reply suggests passing the data in JSON:

Explain command: curl -X POST https://server.com/v1/person -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "Authorization: Bearer Access-Token" -d "k1=v1&k2=v2"

Copilot

Sent by Copilot:

Sure! Here’s a breakdown of the curl command you provided:

curl -X POST https://server.com/v1/person -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "Authorization: Bearer Access-Token" -d "k1=v1&k2=v2"

Explanation:

  • curl: The command-line tool for transferring data with URLs.
  • -X POST: This tells curl to use the POST method.
  • https://server.com/v1/person: The URL to which the request is sent.
  • -H "Content-Type: application/json": This sets the Content-Type header to application/json, indicating that the data being sent is in JSON format.
  • -H "Authorization: Bearer Access-Token": This sets the Authorization header to use a Bearer token for authentication.
  • -d "k1=v1&k2=v2": This sends the data k1=v1&k2=v2 in the body of the request. Note that this format is typically used for URL-encoded data, not JSON.

If you intended to send JSON data, you would format the data differently, like this:

curl -X POST https://server.com/v1/person -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "Authorization: Bearer Access-Token" -d '{"k1":"v1","k2":"v2"}'

This way, the data is correctly formatted as JSON.

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