How to Change User-Agent in Wget?

This article provides a quick overview and practical guide on how to modify or spoof the User-Agent string when using the wget command-line tool. By default, wget identifies itself as “Wget/version”, which some web servers block to prevent automated scraping. Modifying this string allows you to bypass these restrictions, emulate different web browsers, and successfully download the required web content.

Using the –user-agent Option

The most direct way to change the User-Agent string in wget is by using the --user-agent option followed by the desired string in quotes. This tells the target server that the request is coming from a specific browser or device rather than a command-line utility.

For example, to make wget identify itself as a standard Google Chrome browser running on Windows, you would use the following command:

wget --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36" https://example.com

The Short Form Option

If you prefer shorter commands, you can use the -U abbreviation instead of writing out the full --user-agent flag. The functionality remains exactly the same:

wget -U "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/17.0 Safari/605.1.15" https://example.com

Making the Change Permanent

If you find yourself constantly spoofing the User-Agent, you can set a default value in your wget configuration file so you do not have to type the flag every time.

  1. Open your personal wget configuration file (usually located at ~/.wgetrc) in a text editor. If the file does not exist, you can create it.
  2. Add the following line to the file:
user_agent = Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:121.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/121.0
  1. Save and close the file. From this point forward, every wget command you run will automatically use this Firefox User-Agent string unless you manually override it in the terminal.