Passing a URL with brackets to curl

_x000D_ _x000D_ If I try to pass a URL to curl that contains brackets, it fails with an error: $ curl 'http://www.google.com/?TEST[]=1' curl: (3) [globbing] illegal character in range specification at pos 29 However, if I escape both brackets, it appears to work: $ curl 'http://www.google.com/?TEST\[\]=1' Interestingly, I use a backslash to escape only the first bracket it fails silently with error code 20497: $ curl 'http://www.google.com/?TEST\[]=1' $ echo $! 20497 My question is how to fix this for general cases? Is there an argument that will escape URLs automatically, or a description of the characters that need to be escaped before passing to curl?