Recently my company proxy server, through which all the internet traffic is directed, was disrupted and internet services were down. Surprisingly though (for me), I was still able to ping google from the command line, so it looks the internet proxy settings do not apply to the command line. Is this true?
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ping does not use a proxy. ping is sending ICMP packets directly to the target.
A (web/http) proxy in contrast is used for TCP connections. Which programs use a proxy strongly depends on the developers. IE uses the IE proxy settings. Other browsers might at their first start query the IE proxy settings and suggest them as defaults to the user. Other programs might use the Windows HTTP Services API. One of the functions in this API is WinHttpOpen. This function requires a parameter dwAccessType which can be set to "no proxy", "proxy as configured in IE settings" or "manual proxy config". This makes it quite easy for programmers to use the IE proxy. Programmers might also choose to write their own HTTP stack or use some open source HTTP stack. Then again it is up to the programmer to decide if he reads out the IE proxy settings and uses them or not.
Besides, as you have noticed, it is not relevant if a program is a command line tool or a window GUI tool.
Werner Henze
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