How To Use Proxy Server To Access Internet at Shell Prompt With http_proxy Variable

To use a proxy server to access the Internet from a Linux or Unix shell prompt, you can set the http_proxy environment variable to the proxy server address and port number.

Here is an example of how to set the http_proxy variable for a HTTP proxy server running on 192.168.1.10 on port 3128:

export http_proxy=http://192.168.1.10:3128

This will set the http_proxy variable for the current shell session. To make the change permanent, you can add the export line to your Bash profile file, such as ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile.

Once the http_proxy variable is set, you can use most command-line utilities, such as wget, curl, and lynx, to access the Internet through the proxy server.

For example, to download a file using wget through the proxy server, you can use the following command:

wget -e http_proxy=http://192.168.1.10:3128 http://www.example.com/file.zip

This will download the file file.zip from http://www.example.com through the proxy server running on 192.168.1.10 on port 3128.

If you are using a HTTPS proxy server, you can set the https_proxy variable in the same way:

export https_proxy=https://192.168.1.10:3128

Keep in mind that some command-line utilities may not support the http_proxy and https_proxy variables. In such cases, you may need to use a different method to access the Internet through a proxy server.