I failed to find a good example of something that worked to pull a spreadsheet from google-docs using cURL. All that I found didn’t work, in one shape or another.

A bit of playing, and quite a bit of reading got this


#!/bin/bash
PASS=`cat /path/to/0600/google-password-file`
SHEET="https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/download/spreadsheets/Exportkey=addyourownsheetIDhere&exportFormat=csv&gid="

AUTH_TOKE=`curl --silent https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin -d \
Email=foo@example.org -d \
Passwd=${PASS} -d \
accountType=HOSTED -d \
source=cURL-SpreadPull -d \
service=wise | grep Auth\= | sed 's/Auth/auth/'`

curl --silent --output /path/to/file --header "GData-Version: 3.0" --header "Authorization: GoogleLogin ${AUTH_TOKE}" "${SHEET}${TAB}"

seemed to do the trick

Exportkey could be defined in the script, as a variable, thinking about it. You’ll need to supply that; I typically grab it from the web-based URI, but there is a warning in the docs about that:


To determine the URL of a cell-based feed for a given worksheet, get the worksheets metafeed and examine the <link> element in which rel is http://schemas.google.com/spreadsheets/2006#cellsfeed. The href value in that element is the cell feed’s URI.

YMMV.

I’ve added in &exportFormat=csv&gid= because I wanted CSV outputs, and gid’s value is provided via a for … and case deviation.

--header "GData-Version: 3.0" was needed to avoid the redirection.

Hopefully, this might be of benefit — as a working (when written) example of using curl and google docs/google spreadsheets.