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
    7 Essential JavaScript Functions

    I remember the early days of JavaScript where you needed a simple function for just about everything because the browser vendors implemented features differently, and not just edge features, basic features, like addEventListener and attachEvent.  Times have changed but there are still a few functions each developer should...

  • By
    Send Text Messages with PHP

    Kids these days, I tell ya.  All they care about is the technology.  The video games.  The bottled water.  Oh, and the texting, always the texting.  Back in my day, all we had was...OK, I had all of these things too.  But I still don't get...

Incredible Demos

Discussion

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