I'm new to curl and I'm trying to write some curl commands that will
log into a web site that I use and return a small piece of data from
my membership page.

The form action that I call is called start.php. If I knock up a page
in notepad with this form in it and run that in a browser I can log on
manually by keying in the fields - so I don' t think the referer is
being checked.

I _think_ the web site works by running start.php which does some sort
of validation (like checking username and password) and then redirects
off to a page called member.php - this is where I end up when running
this in a browser. How can I make this happen through curl? I've tried
just calling start.php like this:

$ curl --location -s -D - -d "user=987654&password=12345"
http://www.freecall.net.au/start.php

and I've tried embedding a call to member.php in the call to start.php
like this:

$ curl -s -b --location "`curl -s -D - -d "user=987654&password=12345"
http://www.freecall.net.au/start.php | grep Set-Cookie | sed
's/Set-Cookie: //'`" "https://www.freecall.net.au/member.php"

While the embedded command does end up at member.php, something isn't
right because my membership info isn't coming back in the html - it's
behaving as if the authentication failed and it doesn't know which
member to display data for.

Hope this makes sense to someone!
Received on 2006-12-15