How can I schedule to connect to a website on linux?

Question

I would like to be able to do the same thing the scheduler does on Windows with Linux.

Behavior on Windows: I open my browser, I go to mmorpg.com and I login. I select the “remember me” checkbox so a cookie is added to the browser for me not to have to login. Then I add a task in the scheduler to open everyday mmorpg.com so I have a connection per day for my rep not to drop below the 10 threshold to always be able to rate games, etc.

Since my computer isn't always up and running, I would like to do this on my Linux server. It only runs on command prompt on I doubt I would be able to use cookie and auto-login with Linux, link or others.

Is there anyway I can achieve this? Cron job seems to be unable to do this.

Answer 1

Cron alone cannot do anything except call other scripts; this is perfectly doable, it's just a matter of glueing together the right parts.

Depending on what you're comfortable with, you could do this with curl - if all you need to do is log in, just figure out where the login form action goes and use curl to do a POST to the right address with your username/password. The curl docs include a tutorial on using curl to emulate the actions of a web browser, which should give you everything you need to create a script that logs you in each day.

If you're more comfortable with python (or if you need to do more than just log in), Mechanize is touted as a good way to script interaction with websites, but I've not used it.

Answer 2

It sounds as if you may want to look at wwwoffle. It's available for all major Linux distros, and it can automatically download the content of specified web pages at a set time, for later viewing. It's also a caching web proxy that might make your bandwidth use more efficient.