LinuxQuestions.org - Interacting with a website using Perl and LWP

I'm trying to write a Perl script that will go out to a website, log in, pull up a query page, fill-in and submit the query, extract a few specific lines from the query results, and finally place that output into a file.

I'm having difficulty with the log in portion. It appears that rather than using the built-in Apache authentication, the developer decided to write their own authentication scheme that uses cookies.

I setup a cookie jar but I'm not certain I'm actually getting and keeping the cookie. When I try to go to a page after the log in page I get an error saying I'm not logged in or my session has expired.

Here's the code as I have it thus far.

Code:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

use LWP;

use HTTP::Cookies;



my $url = 'https://www.space-track.org/perl/login.pl';

my $proxy = 'http://proxy:80';



# Create a useragent

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;



# Set the proxy

$ua->proxy(['https'], $proxy);



# Setup my cookie jar

#$ua->cookie_jar( {} );

my $cookie_jar = HTTP::Cookies->new(

        file => "/Perl/cookies.lwp",

        autosave => 1,

);

$ua->cookie_jar( $cookie_jar );



# Post the username and password

my $res = $ua->post( $url ,

        [

          'username' => 'XXXXXXXX',

          'password' => 'XXXXXXXX',

        ]

);



# Print out the response

print $res->content;

print "\n ***** \n";



$res = $ua->post(

        'https://www.space-track.org/perl/id_query.pl'

        );



print $res->content;

print "\n ***** \n";

Thanks for any help.

Tom

P.S. I had to sanitize a few things from my code. i.e. username and password