How to Specify User Agent with cURL

By  on  

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!

Recent Features

  • By
    9 More Mind-Blowing WebGL Demos

    With Firefox OS, asm.js, and the push for browser performance improvements, canvas and WebGL technologies are opening a world of possibilities.  I featured 9 Mind-Blowing Canvas Demos and then took it up a level with 9 Mind-Blowing WebGL Demos, but I want to outdo...

  • By
    Create a CSS Cube

    CSS cubes really showcase what CSS has become over the years, evolving from simple color and dimension directives to a language capable of creating deep, creative visuals.  Add animation and you've got something really neat.  Unfortunately each CSS cube tutorial I've read is a bit...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Drag and Drop MooTools File Uploads

    Honesty hour confession:  file uploading within the web browser sucks.  It just does.  Like the ugly SELECT element, the file input is almost unstylable and looks different on different platforms.  Add to those criticism the fact that we're all used to drag and drop operations...

  • By
    HTML5 Datalist

    One of the most used JavaScript widgets over the past decade has been the text box autocomplete widget.  Every JavaScript framework has their own autocomplete widget and many of them have become quite advanced.  Much like the placeholder attribute's introduction to markup, a frequently used...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!