This post wraps up another Twitter thread I started a few days ago:

If you ever get bored using “copy” to copy files you can always use … curl:

curl file://c:\test\foo -o bar

Same way, you can use it instead of “type” or “cat”

curl file://c:\test\foo

You can also copy file by… uploading it locally

curl -T bar file://c:\test\

this will copy “bar” file to “c:\test\bar”.

And during copying, you can stat copying at a given offset:

and even cooler, you can extract any part of the file using range

curl file://c:\test\foo -C 1

dynamic payload building anyone?

and even cooler, you can extract any part of the file using range

curl file://c:\test\foo -r2-10

offering a chance to build dynamic payloads.

The operation is surgical and using Procmon we can confirm it reads only these two specific bytes:

@nf3xn added one more interesting option:

curl --remote-time file://c:\test\foo -o bar

to preserve file timestamps.