Curl and sharepoint authentication

Our sharepoint uses NTLM for authentication, it took me some time to figure that out. I access a sharepoint site from our Linux Data Warehouse environment using curl. Seems like curl can handle NTLM, but this is what curl says about NTLM.  

The NTLM authentication method was designed by Microsoft and is used by IIS web servers. It is a proprietary protocol, reverse-engineered by clever people and implemented in curl based on their efforts. This kind of behavior should not be endorsed, you should encourage everyone who uses NTLM to switch to a public and documented authentication method instead, such as Digest.

curl --ntlm -u userid  http://sharepointServer/thePathTo/Items