CURL works only as root

Question

I'm on an Ubuntu 10.04 installation and somehow curl stopped working with my user. I always receive: curl: (7) couldn't connect to host. It only works as root. Can anyone help me?

Answer 1

I checked the curl google.comstrace log and the key line is surely 409:

connect(3, {sa_family=AF_INET, sin_port=htons(9999), sin_addr=inet_addr("127.0.0.1")}, 16) = -1 EINPROGRESS (Operation now in progress)

If I (for the testing) launch curl http://localhost:1357, I get in the strace:

connect(3, {sa_family=AF_INET, sin_port=htons(1357), sin_addr=inet_addr("127.0.0.1")}, 16) = -1 EINPROGRESS (Operation now in progress)

So, by some weird reason instead of google.com curl tries to connect to localhost:9999.

Can you post:

• /etc/hosts
• /etc/nsswitch.conf
• ~/.bashrc
• /etc/host.conf
• /etc/gai.conf
• output of ldd /usr/bin/curl
• output of env

Answer 2

I am thinking that maybe some library that curl needs is now only accessible by root for whatever reason. A couple of things you could try:

sudo apt-get purge curl libcurl3
sudo apt-get install curl

then, if that doesn't fix it:

strace curl http://site.com/file.txt &> curl.log

and post the output on pastebin.com or something for us.

Answer 3

Maybe one user is using a proxy and the other one isn't. See if either your user or root has the http_proxy or HTTP_PROXY environment variable defined.

Also see if root has a .curlrc file that contains an option that makes it work, or if your user has a .curlrc that makes it not work.