Re: simple standalone LDAP client program?

Mark Smith wrote:
> Nelson Bolyard wrote:
>> Hi LDAP gurus,
>>
>> There are numerous small stand-alone programs that take an http URL as a
>> command line argument and fetch the requested URL and store it to a local
>> file (or write it to stdout).  Examples include wget and graburl.
>>
>> Is there a similar program for ldap?
>> ...
> 
> Try curl.

Thanks, Mark!

I downloaded curl from http://curl.haxx.se/
(that name didn't give me a lot of confidence :-/  )

There was a readme, but no comprehensive documentation on the command
line syntax (that I could find).  I couldn't find any clues in the
numerous text files that came with it that it supported ldap URLs.
But emboldened by your recommendation, I tried the command

curl $THAT_URL > /tmp/identrust.crt

and got an interesting result.  It was a text file containing two
lines of text.  The first line looked a lot like the original URL

DN: cn=DST ACES CA X6,ou=DST ACES,o=Digital Signature Trust,c=US

The second line was a very long line which began:

        cACertificate;binary: MIIEC[...]

The rest of the line contained a base64-encoding of the cert,
all in one single line.  The program also wrote to stderr this:

  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
  0     0    0     0    0     0      0      0 --:--:--  0:00:01 --:--:--     0

I thought it a little odd that the output said "cACertificate;binary:"
when the output was not binary but rather base64 encoded, but
maybe that's an LDAP thing?  "binary" means "base64" ??

I expunged all the but long base64 stuff, then used fold to fold it
into 72-character lines, then added back the original header line,
and lines that said:
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
and
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
and the result worked quite nicely.

Many thanks.

/Nelson