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
    Write Better JavaScript with Promises

    You've probably heard the talk around the water cooler about how promises are the future. All of the cool kids are using them, but you don't see what makes them so special. Can't you just use a callback? What's the big deal? In this article, we'll...

  • By
    Regular Expressions for the Rest of Us

    Sooner or later you'll run across a regular expression. With their cryptic syntax, confusing documentation and massive learning curve, most developers settle for copying and pasting them from StackOverflow and hoping they work. But what if you could decode regular expressions and harness their power? In...

Incredible Demos

Discussion

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