Linux http_proxy: escape @ character

to use services like wget on linux from behind a proxy server that requires username-password authentication
requires setting up an environment variable for the shell

usually it suffices to do this:

shashanksingh@nsl-31:~$http_proxy=http://username:password@proxyserver:80/

the placeholders having obvious meanings. A problem however arises if the password has an ‘@’ character inside it. This @, being a delimiter will mess things up, e.g., if the password were my@pass, the url will become

http://username:my@pass@proxyserver:80/

wget will then parse it and treat the first @ as if it were the delimiter to mark the end of the password and the beginning of the proxy address. As a result it will assume:

user: username
pass: my
proxy host: pass@proxyserver:80

and you will get an error like this

Resolving pass@proxyserver... failed: Name or service not known.

One possible solution that comes to mind is to escape the @. This somehow does not work (for wget at least). So

shashanksingh@nsl-31:~$http_proxy=http://username:\@password@proxyserver:80/

gives the same error (I wonder if I am guessing the escape character right, if you know why it’s not working please post in comments 🙂 )

A work-around is to create a .wgetrc file. wget loads this file when run (you can find more details here).

A file like this works fine for me

http_proxy=proxyserver:80
proxy_user=username
proxy_passwd=my@pass

Place the .wgetrc file in your home directory ($HOME) or other possible locations as mentioned in the link above.

UPDATE: while escaping does not seem to work for wget, exporting a http_proxy in .bashrc seem to handle escaping using ‘\’. So if your password is @agrambagram, adding a line at the end of ~/.bashrc works

export http_proxy=http://username:\@agrambagram@proxyserver:80