

They’re just examples of things you could pipe curl into, but no not really. If the download fails you end up with an incomplete file in your tmpfs anyway, and have to retry. Another use I have is curl | mysql to restore a database backup.
If the server supports resuming, I guess that can be better than the pipe, but that still needs temporary disk space, and downloads rarely fail. You can’t corrupt downloads over HTTPS either as the encryption layer would notice it and kill the connection, so it’s safe to assume if it downloaded in full, it’s correct.
With downloads being IO bound these days, it’s nice to not have to read it all back and write the extracted files to disk afterwards. Only writes the final files once.
That’s far from the weirdest thing I’ve done with pipes though, I’ve installed Windows 11 on a friend’s PC across the ocean with a curl | zstd | pv | dd, and it worked. We tried like 5 different USBs and different ISOs and I gave up, I just installed it in a VM and shipped the image.



Not all routers have all that great security either. Even if the admin page isn’t exposed to the Internet, you can access it and so does your browser. Just takes a little bit of XSS and oops.