Equivalent of cURL for Ruby?

Curb-fu is a wrapper around Curb which in turn uses libcurl. What does Curb-fu offer over Curb? Just a lot of syntactic sugar - but that can be often what you need.

If you like it less low-level, there is also Typhoeus, which is built on top of Curl::Multi.

Use OpenURI and

  open("http://...", :http_basic_authentication=>[user, password])

accessing sites/pages/resources that require HTTP authentication.

Curb and Curl::Multi provide cURL bindings for Ruby.