Occasionally you will want to retrieve a structure from the COD database, or run a search from within your program or script, so that you can format results to your liking or process results automatically. There are several ways to do this:

• If you know a COD number for a structure, you can download it directly from a pre-defined URL: http://www.crystallography.net/cod/[COD-number].cif, where the [COD-number] construct should be replaced by the COD number of your structure.

For example, commands on Linux, Mac and other *x-like systems would be:

curl http://www.crystallography.net/cod/1000000.cif
wget http://www.crystallography.net/cod/1000000.cif