One thing you're not doing is posting back to the page everything it
expects to see. In my experience, web servers are often like little
kids - you don't give them what they expect, they pout... :)

So, to keep the peace, try something more like this:

    curl -d "index=Index%20Now" -d "sp-cache=1" -d "sp-count=1" -o
"ja_curl.html" -u "myusername:mypassword"
"https://center.atomz.com/center/search/index/?sp-id=0011da71-sp10024a7&sp-efn=full&sp-fn=index"

OK, so maybe the data in the form action could also be passed using:

    -d "sp-id=0011da71-sp10024a7" -d "sp-efn=full" -d "sp-fn=index"

in which case you should leave the trailing '?' off the url. I'm not
exactly sure if that would hand the server something different to what
it expects, so you might want to try it both ways.

Lastly, when it works via the browser, do you go through any other
pages? If so, your curl script could be missing out on a cookie
collection. Again, in my experience, you need to start from the first
page you get with the browser and collect cookies all along the way (and
following redirects, but that's a whole 'nother sackful of ferrets...
:).

Ralph Mitchell

Jeff Alperin wrote:

> I'm trying to automate the submission of a form and having problems.
> Here's how the process works with a browser: Log into site with
> username and password. Once logged in, click link to select
> appropriate page. Click Submit button on form.
>
> The html for the form looks something like this:
>
> <form action="?sp-id=0011da71-sp10024a7&sp-efn=full&sp-fn=index"
> method=POST>
> <table width="100%" cellpadding=2 cellspacing=0 border=0>
> <tr>
> <td align=left valign=middle width="30%"><input type=Submit name=index
> value="Index Now"></td>
> <td valign=middle width="30%"><input name="sp-cache" type=checkbox
> value=1><span class=blacktext>Clear index cache</span></td>
> <td valign=middle width="30%"><input name="sp-count" type=checkbox
> value=1><span class=blacktext>Count all pages</span></td>
> </tr>
> </table>
> </form>
>
> When I use a browser the url for the page looks like this:
>
> https://center.atomz.com/center/search/index/?sp-efn=full&
> p-id=0011da71-sp10024a7
>
> So, this is the curl command I used:
>
> curl -d "sp-id=0011da71-sp10024a7&sp-efn=full" -o "ja_curl.html" -u
> "myusername:mypassword"
> "https://center.atomz.com/center/search/index/?"
>
> The problem is that the resulting page is always "Page not found: The
> requested URL /center/search/index/ was not found on this server."
>
> Interestingly, if I leave the -u "myusername:mypassword" off, it does
> pull a page from the server, but it's a page requesting me to log in.
>
> Any ideas what I'm doing wrong? Thanks.
>
> --Jeff
>
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
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Received on 2002-10-31