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!
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