So I've got a complex problem. I've been perusing the archives and not seen anything resembling a conversation on it, but I may well have missed one. If this is a solved problem, I will apologize and dissapear for the small consideration of some pointers to the previous emails. :D
So, my problem: I want to be able to log in to a secured (https) site via a form post. The problem is the site uses some weird server-side session expressed in a different form-post-URL each time I load the login page. For example: I click on the "login" page, and the page-source form looks like so: <form name="signin" action="https://foo.bar.com:port/UNIQUE_STRING/dir/session.cgi?var=val"; AutoComplete="off" method="post"> ... various, straight-forward inputs </form> where "UNIQUE_STRING" is some string that changes each time I click on the login page and view the source. The first time it might be something like "ca1_bn1_on", the next "ca1_eb3_on", etc, with no apparent pattern. So, what I want to do is automatically surf to the login page (that URL is static), then automatically post to the ever-changing form with my particular login info filled out. All that needs to happen in the same session, since if I do it via 2 separate wget calls (see below) it fails: wget https://foo.bar.com:port/login ... various script-magic to extract form post and assemble URL below wget "https://foo.bar.com:port/UNIQUE_STRING/dir/session.cgi?var=val&name=me&pass=foobar&etc..."; ... the second call fails - well it connects and the server returns valid HTML, but the HTML is the login page with a note of "session logged out - please login again". Now, I don't know how they know to discount the second connect... it doesn't look like they're using cookies since when I do a --save-cookies=cookies.txt on the first wget call the cookies.txt file is invariably empty (save the wget header). Maybe something to do with the SSL connection? I don't know, I'm just taking shots in the dark there. I think I may need to be able to do something like: wget --recursive --post-data="name=me&password=foo" --follow-tags=form https://foo.bar.com:port/login and have it load the login page, then recursively try to post each form with my post-data. Problem is, that doesn't seem to work. Any thoughts? Thanks! -Greg
