CURL request using .netrc file

Question

I am trying to write a script which is saving the credentials to a .netrc file and then it is reading from the file in order to pass them to a curl command and saves the returned cookie file for future use. I am interested if this is secure way to pass the username and password and if there is a man in the middle attack would they be able to sniff the credentials if the server which I am trying to reach is over HTTP.

#!/bin/bash

IP="192.168.0.1"
user="Administrator"
pass="Password1234"

function credentials {
    mkdir "${HOME}"/.netrc
    rm "${HOME}"/.netrc/credentials.txt
    touch "${HOME}"/.netrc/credentials.txt
    { echo "machine ${IP}"; echo "login ${user}"; echo "password ${pass}"; } >> "${HOME}"/.netrc/credentials.txt
    chmod 600 "${HOME}"/.netrc/credentials.txt
}

function cookie {
    curl -v -c cookie.txt -n "${HOME}"/.netrc/credentials.txt http://"${IP}"/setup.php
}

credentials
cookie

I have checked and the credentials.txt file is properly saved in the corresponding directory and the credentials have the right permissions, but when I try to run the cookie function, I got the following error: Couldn't find host 192.168.0.1 in the .netrc file; using defaults. Why curl is not able to fetch the configured username and password from the credentials.txt file?

Solution

As I understand the man page (of curl), the option -n just enables looking for a .netrc file, but it does not expect the file path of this file. This is the option --netrc-file. From the man-page:

--netrc-file
   This option is similar to --netrc, except that you provide the 
   path (absolute or relative) to the netrc file that Curl should use. 
   You can  only  specify one netrc file per invocation. If several 
   --netrc-file options are provided, only the last one will be used.       
   (Added in 7.21.5)

   This option overrides any use of --netrc as they are mutually 
   exclusive.  It will also abide by --netrc-optional if specified.

Comments

[Georgi Stoyanov]

yes, this seems to be the problem, I was thinking that -n and --netrc-file are the same like --verbose and -v but apparently they are not. Thanks for the hint!