curl: (1) Protocol "'smtps" not supported or disabled in libcurl - I've tried the common solutions

Question

Having issues connecting to a SMTP server with curl. The script I am running has worked on other hosts so its an issue with curl. Ubuntu version 16.04 (xenial). The pre installed curl version was 7.47. Everytime I run a command similar to this curl --url \'smtps://smtp.gmail.com:465\' ...the rest of the args I get the error

curl: (1) Protocol "'smtps" not supported or disabled in libcurl

Very strange since I've had previous ubuntu installations that came with curl pre installed and had smtp support.

curl --version

outputs this

curl 7.47.0 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.47.0 GnuTLS/3.4.10 zlib/1.2.8 libidn/1.32 librtmp/2.3 Protocols: dict file ftp ftps gopher http https imap imaps ldap ldaps pop3 pop3s rtmp rtsp smb smbs smtp smtps telnet tftp Features: AsynchDNS IDN IPv6 Largefile GSS-API Kerberos SPNEGO NTLM NTLM_WB SSL libz TLS-SRP UnixSockets

as you can see smtp and smtps are listed as protocols but i am unsure whether they are the ones enabled or supported?

Heres what I've done following the advice of similar threads

uninstalled curl with sudo apt-get remove curl then followed the answer here

whenever it was time to run the configure script i gave it the following options

./configure --with-ssl --enable-smtp --enable-smtps

after i finished, i got the same error... Then i tried reinstalling with apt-get install curl. but still get the same error. What gives? if there are no ways to resolve this gracefully, could I accomplish the same thing with wget?

Answer 1

You have a leading apostrophe (') since you're escaping it with a backslash (\) - The output is a bit hard to read but curl is trying to tell you this, but since it's next to some double quotes (") it doesn't stand out:

curl: (1) Protocol "'smtps" not supported or disabled in libcurl
--------------------^