Re: [Bug-wget] [bug #45443] http_proxy variable should also work for capitalized HTTP_PROXY

[Daniel Stenberg]

On Tue, 30 Jun 2015, NoëlKöthe wrote:

(Pruned the receivers list to the wget list only.)

The reason some tools don't accept "HTTP_PROXY" and only "http_proxy" is that 
the CGI interface from back in the old days provide headers from the incoming 
request to the CGI program prefixed with "HTTP_".

Thus, running a CGI script from a server, an incoming "Proxy:" header (which 
normally doesn't do anything) would be sent to the program as "HTTP_PROXY", 
leading to confusions or in the worst case some sort of attack.

The CGI interface is an ancient thing, probably boardering to extinction. 
Still it is out there and some such CGIs probably use wget.

Incidently, curl also only accepts the lower case version of this environment 
variable and I believe it goes for some other related tools as well.

--

 / daniel.haxx.se