Resty is a marvellous little shell script which simplifies command-line access to REST resources (e.g. CouchDB) tremendously.

Instead of very long curl command-lines, you'll typically use the GET, PUT, POST, DELETE commands -- functions imported to your shell from Resty.

I've made a short screencast to demonstrate:

That last command I showed you might be Resty's best, so I'll give it to you again, so that it sinks in:

GET /jane | PUT -V

Highly recommended.