I would rather use wget than curl (curl has too many pre-reqs)
Sorry not to answer the question and go off on an tangent, but what requirements does curl have that you can't install? If you build from source, about the only requirement that may not be on any stock system would be OpenSSL, and you can opt not to configure SSL support. curl is my favorite tool in my sys admin/programmer's toolkit. wget can't touch its flexibility.
