On 2014-06-12 11:32, Alexander Hall wrote:
> On June 11, 2014
6:18:19 AM CEST, Lawrence Teo <l...@openbsd.org> wrote:
>
>> This diff
allows ftp(1) to change the User-Agent for HTTP(S) URL requests via the
FTPUSERAGENT environment variable (personally I prefer HTTPUSERAGENT but
FTPUSERAGENT is what's used by ftp(1) on other BSDs). This is useful
when fetching URLs that are sensitive to the User-Agent, such as sites
that send different content if you're using a mobile browser/device.
>
> I generally dislike passing options as environment variables. The use
case you describe does not really strike me as something I'd have in my
$ENV.
>
> Does any of the other ftp's have a corresponding switch for
it?
There are conflicting precedents.
curl provides -A/--user-agent
and wget provides -U/--user-agent, and neither appears to obey any
environment variable for setting the user agent string. OpenBSD, FreeBSD
and NetBSD's ftp(1) all use "-A" to mean something else, and none of
them appear to have a "-U" option yet.
As the OP mentioned, however,
{Net,Free}BSD's ftp(1) already uses $FTPUSERAGENT.
As a user, I don't
really care which way it happens. I can trivially either run "ftp -U
$FTPUSERAGENT ..." or (not assuming any particular shell) "env
FTPUSERAGENT=blah ftp ..." depending on what I'm trying to accomplish.
If I were trying to write something without checking the man page,
which would be rather unsmart, I would probably assume that OpenBSD
behaves like the other BSDs.
-Adam
