curl: (3) Illegal characters found in URL with bash shell

Question

I want to get the random page from wiki and paste it on txt file.

curl -I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random|grep -E "Location:"|cut -d ' ' -f2 > "result.txt"

But when I retrieve it from txt file and it come out the error.

cat result.txt| xargs -I % curl %

What's the content of your result.txt file? Which shell do you use? Why do you use xargs -I %. Have you tried xargs --verbose? — hagello
– hagello, Commented Mar 21, 2016 at 11:43

Martin Tournoij · Accepted Answer · 2016-03-21 12:10:42Z

1

How about just following redirects with curl by adding the -L switch? No need to parse the Location header:

curl -L https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

answered Mar 21, 2016 at 12:10

Martin Tournoij

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