Reference

informer(1)

lightweight, command line, HTML form handling

NAME

informer - lightweight, command line, HTML form handling

SYNOPSIS

informer [ -c -cloaked ] [ -c -cloaked ] [ URL ]

DESCRIPTION

This manual page briefly describes the informer commands.

informer allows you to fill out HTML forms from the UNIX command line. It is basically ment to be embedded in your own scripts.

WHY INFORMER?

Most commercial website designers do not want you to ignore their graphics, because that's where the money is. As a result, they come up with schemes to prevent you from accessing their data without looking at the pictures. The schemes I came accross so far are:

•

browser name checking

Basically not allowing you to see a page if your browser isn't MSIE or Mozilla.

•

Referer: header checking

To prevent you from sending a precomposed HTML form to a URL, some sites check whether you have just visited their source page.

Informer handles both cases. The first one by masquerading as a I browser :-), the second one by actually visiting the source page first, and setting the Referer: header accordingly.

SEE ALSO

toolbus(1), perl-adapter(1), tifstoc(1)

AUTHOR

This manual page was written by Julien LEMOINE <[email protected]>. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts and no Back-Cover Texts.