Sites not accepting wget user agent header

When I run this command:

wget --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8; rv:21.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/21.0"  http://yahoo.com

...I get this result (with nothing else in the file):

<!-- hw147.fp.gq1.yahoo.com uncompressed/chunked Wed Jun 19 03:42:44 UTC 2013 -->

But when I run wget http://yahoo.com with no --user-agent option, I get the full page.

The user agent is the same header that my current browser sends. Why does this happen? Is there a way to make sure the user agent doesn't get blocked when using wget?

Solution 1:

It seems Yahoo server does some heuristic based on User-Agent in a case Accept header is set to */*.

Accept: text/html

did the trick for me.

e.g.

wget  --header="Accept: text/html" --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8; rv:21.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/21.0"  http://yahoo.com

Note: if you don't declare Accept header then wget automatically adds Accept:*/* which means give me anything you have.

Solution 2:

I created a ~/.wgetrc file with the following content (obtained from askapache.com but with a newer user agent, because otherwise it didn’t work always):

header = Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
header = Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
header = Connection: keep-alive
user_agent = Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Fedora; Linux x86_64; rv:40.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/40.0
referer = /
robots = off

Now I’m able to download from most (all?) file-sharing (streaming video) sites.

Solution 3:

You need to set both the user-agent and the referer:

 wget  --header="Accept: text/html" --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8; rv:21.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/21.0" --referer  connect.wso2.com http://dist.wso2.org/products/carbon/4.2.0/wso2carbon-4.2.0.zip