Thanks for the reply!
Network preferences are set to auto proxy discovery and automatic proxy configuration. I have the .pac file from which i got the proxy server.
Currently on VPN to the office network... i tried the curl command in the terminal window
curl -I http://google.com gives no output in the window
curl with proxy gives this
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Location: http://www.google.com/
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 08:06:40 GMT
Expires: Wed, 29 May 2013 08:06:40 GMT
Cache-Control: public, max-age=2592000
Server: gws
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
Content-Length: 219
Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive
Connection: Keep-Alive
So I guess its a problem with the curl not getting the proxy settings by default. Do I add the CURLOPT_PROXY option to the curl options? Any other option to go with it?