How to fix bash: curl: command not found on Linux

curl is a command line app that allows you to transfer data from your terminal. You can use curl for example to download an app.

If you encountered the error "bash: curl: command not found" on your terminal, this means that the distro that you are using doesn't have curl installed.

curl is installed on some distros by default, and you don't need to install it. However, this is distro specific and in some cases you need to install curl manually.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to fix "bash: curl: command not found" error on Linux

1) Check if curl is installed

To check if curl is installed, you can use the --version command. This command will display the version of curl if installed.

As you can see, we are running curl 7.88.1 version on Debian 12

If curl it's not installed, then it will show the error "bash: /usr/bin/curl: No such file or directory" meaning curl binary was not found on your machine.

2) Install curl

curl can be installed on any Linux distro. In this tutorial, we are using Debian 12 as example, and to install curl on Debian, simply run the command below

sudo apt install curl

3) Verify that the error is fixed

Now that you know what causes this error, you need to verify that the error is fixed by installing curl.

For example, in our case we were getting this error when running curl on the terminal to see if curl binary was found on our machine, in other words if curl was installed on Debian 12.

curl

Now that curl is installed on our machine, when we run curl command without passing any other arguments, we get the output it is designed to show when you run curl without arguments.

4) Use curl

Now you should be good to use curl and complete the task that you couldn't before installing curl.

If you are new to curl, you can use the help option to get basic commands that you can use with curl

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you learned what causes the error "bash: curl: command not found" and how to fix.