curl/docs/libcurl/curl_easy_init.md
Daniel Stenberg eefcc1bda4
docs: introduce "curldown" for libcurl man page format
curldown is this new file format for libcurl man pages. It is markdown
inspired with differences:

- Each file has a set of leading headers with meta-data
- Supports a small subset of markdown
- Uses .md file extensions for editors/IDE/GitHub to treat them nicely
- Generates man pages very similar to the previous ones
- Generates man pages that still convert nicely to HTML on the website
- Detects and highlights mentions of curl symbols automatically (when
  their man page section is specified)

tools:

- cd2nroff: converts from curldown to nroff man page
- nroff2cd: convert an (old) nroff man page to curldown
- cdall: convert many nroff pages to curldown versions
- cd2cd: verifies and updates a curldown to latest curldown

This setup generates .3 versions of all the curldown versions at build time.

CI:

Since the documentation is now technically markdown in the eyes of many
things, the CI runs many more tests and checks on this documentation,
including proselint, link checkers and tests that make sure we capitalize the
first letter after a period...

Closes #12730
2024-01-23 00:29:02 +01:00

1.9 KiB

c SPDX-License-Identifier Title Section Source See-also
Copyright (C) Daniel Stenberg, <daniel.se>, et al. curl curl_easy_init 3 libcurl
curl_easy_cleanup (3)
curl_easy_duphandle (3)
curl_easy_perform (3)
curl_easy_reset (3)
curl_global_init (3)
curl_multi_init (3)

NAME

curl_easy_init - Start a libcurl easy session

SYNOPSIS

#include <curl/curl.h>

CURL *curl_easy_init();

DESCRIPTION

This function allocates and returns a CURL easy handle. Such a handle is used as input to other functions in the easy interface. This call must have a corresponding call to curl_easy_cleanup(3) when the operation is complete.

The easy handle is used to hold and control a single network transfer. It is encouraged to reuse easy handles for repeated transfers.

An alternative way to get a new easy handle is to duplicate an already existing one with curl_easy_duphandle(3), which has the upside that it gets all the options that were set in the source handle set in the new copy as well.

If you did not already call curl_global_init(3) before calling this function, curl_easy_init(3) does it automatically. This may be lethal in multi-threaded cases, if curl_global_init(3) is not thread-safe in your system, and it may then result in resource problems because there is no corresponding cleanup.

You are strongly advised to not allow this automatic behavior, by calling curl_global_init(3) yourself properly. See the description in libcurl(3) of global environment requirements for details of how to use this function.

EXAMPLE

int main(void)
{
  CURL *curl = curl_easy_init();
  if(curl) {
    CURLcode res;
    curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_URL, "https://example.com");
    res = curl_easy_perform(curl);
    curl_easy_cleanup(curl);
  }
}

AVAILABILITY

Always

RETURN VALUE

If this function returns NULL, something went wrong and you cannot use the other curl functions.