> curl follows redirects, `curl -O` is functionally identical to wget.

No it's not :)

You need to `curl -LO`. See for example github releases:

  curl -LO https://github.com/S2-/gitlit/releases/download/v1.4.1/gitlit-1.4.1.tar.gz

downloads the tar.gz, while

  curl -O https://github.com/S2-/gitlit/releases/download/v1.4.1/gitlit-1.4.1.tar.gz

will download an html file.

Even better would be to use `curl -LOJ`, so if the filename is not in the url, but in the `Content-Disposition filename` http response header, curl would get the filename from there.

Pretty good overview of why I just use wget for such things.

curl follows standard redirects but there are a couple of fairly common redirects that it doesn't.

--Someone who built a browser on libcurl