What does curl do?

Ah, that's a great question!

curl is a command-line tool for transferring data with URLs. In simple terms, it's used to download files or data from the internet, or to upload data to a server.

Think of it like a web browser, but one that operates entirely from your terminal without a graphical interface.

In the command you just saw:
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rapid7/metasploit-omnibus/master/config/templates/metasploit-framework-wrappers/msfupdate.erb > /tmp/msfinstall

• curl is initiating the data transfer.
• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/... is the URL where the Metasploit installation script is located.
• > is a redirection operator in Bash, which means "take the output of the command on the left and write it to the file specified on the right."
• /tmp/msfinstall is the destination file where the downloaded script will be saved.

So, this specific curl command downloads the Metasploit installation script from that GitHub URL and saves it into a file named msfinstall in your /tmp directory.

Does that explanation help clarify what curl does?