How to Specify User Agent with cURL
Over the years I've shared how to perform a number of actions with cURL: how to send POST data, how to retrieve headers, follow redirects, check GZIP encoding, and more. Another useful cURL directive is sending the user agent, as some servers respond with different content or headers depending on the user agent. Let's have a look at how easy it is to send the user agent with cURL!
The user agent may be sent with the -A or --user-agent directives:
curl -A "MY-USER-AGENT" https://www.whatismybrowser.com/detect/what-is-my-user-agent
# .... Your user agent is: `MY-USER-AGENT` ...
Luckily we don't rely on user agent strings as much as we did in the early days of the web, but we'd be naive to assume that they no longer modify the output of all websites!
![Page Visibility API]()
One event that's always been lacking within the document is a signal for when the user is looking at a given tab, or another tab. When does the user switch off our site to look at something else? When do they come back?
![CSS @supports]()
Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS. What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix. Yuck. Another thing we...
![Using MooTools to Instruct Google Analytics to Track Outbound Links]()
Google Analytics provides a wealth of information about who's coming to your website. One of the most important statistics the service provides is the referrer statistic -- you've gotta know who's sending people to your website, right? What about where you send others though?
![MooTools History Plugin]()
One of the reasons I love AJAX technology so much is because it allows us to avoid unnecessary page loads. Why download the header, footer, and other static data multiple times if that specific data never changes? It's a waste of time, processing, and bandwidth. Unfortunately...
