rfc is a little tool written in Bash to read RFCs from the command-line. It fetches RFCs and drafts from the Web and caches them locally.

Just type rfc followed by the RFC number or the draft name:

$ rfc <RFC num>

e.g.:

rfc 42 # Read the RFC 42
rfc 1234 # Read the RFC 1234
rfc draft-ietf-core-coap-18 # Read IETF draft core-coap version 18

Use rfc help to see all available subcommands.

• --version: same as the version subcommand
• --help: same as the help subcommand

• 0: normal execution
• 1: the requested RFC or archive cannot be found
• 2: unrecognized option/subcommand
• 3: unable to connect to the network
• 4: can't find curl nor wget

mkdir -p ~/bin
curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bfontaine/rfc/v0.2.6/rfc > ~/bin/rfc
chmod u+x ~/bin/rfc

This creates the ~/bin directory if it doesn’t exist, and download rfc in it. If it’s not in your PATH, you have to add it:

echo 'export PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc

You may also want to install the manpage, located in man/rfc.1.

If you use Homebrew or Linuxbrew you can install rfc with one command:

brew install bfontaine/utils/rfc

For archlinux users, you can use the AUR package rfc-read.

The command for use it is rfc.

• curl or wget. It’ll try $CURL, then curl, then wget.
• less or another pager. It uses $PAGER if it’s set.

You can choose which directory rfc uses by setting the RFC_DIR environment variable. The directory is automatically created if it doesn’t exist.

The default directory is ~/.RFCs.

rfc version 0.2.5 and above has a special --debug flag that, if passed as the first argument, enables tracing of all the Bash commands in the script.

Baptiste Fontaine and contributors.