Fix "curl: option --compressed...doesn't support this" Cygwin

If we are using cURL on Windows with Cygwin, and we want to use the --compressed option, we will encounter the error:

curl: option --compressed: the installed libcurl version doesn't support this 

It seems like a serious situation but it is not. One option we have is to simply use Linux;). In any other case, since we are using Windows for something, the error is that we forgot to do something. By using Cygwin, we can install the packages selectively or all the same, curl will work in a limited way even when it is not installed with Cygwin, so the solution is simple, we must install it.

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Install cURL with the Cygwin installer

It does not matter if we already have some packages, we start the installer again as if it were the first time. In View we select the option Full and in Search we write the packages we need. This time, we are looking for the following packages:

• curl
• curl-debuginfo
• libcurl4
• libcurl-devel
• libcurl-doc

In the New column we leave Keep for those that are already installed and select the latest version available for those that are not. We click Next to everything and simply close and open the Cygwin terminal.

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Testing cURL

To check that it has support for the --compressed option, we use the following command:

curl --version

The output should look like this:

$ curl --version
curl 7.75.0 (x86_64-pc-cygwin) libcurl/7.75.0 OpenSSL/1.1.1f zlib/1.2.11 brotli/1.0.9 zstd/1.4.9 libidn2/2.2.0 libpsl/0.21.0 (+libidn2/2.0.4) libssh2/1.7.0 nghttp2/1.37.0
Release-Date: 2021-02-03
Protocols: dict file ftp ftps gopher gophers http https imap imaps ldap ldaps mqtt pop3 pop3s rtsp scp sftp smb smbs smtp smtps telnet tftp Features: alt-svc AsynchDNS brotli Debug GSS-API HTTP2 HTTPS-proxy IDN IPv6 Kerberos Largefile libz Metalink NTLM NTLM_WB PSL SPNEGO SSL TLS-SRP TrackMemory UnixSockets zstd

We check that brotli is found, which is the compression system currently used by modern web browsers.

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