I've put together a little script that will do some pre-fetching on a web-application. The app has a result-cache and will output a refresh whenever it encounters a cache-miss and does its calculations.

Instead of parsing the refresh-URLs or somesuch, I simply limited the number of refreshs the script will perform. Perhaps somemonk will find a useful snippet of code herein.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use WWW::Mechanize; 

my $maxrefreshs=5;
my $debug=0;
my @urls=(
   "http://www.whatever.xy/cgi-bin/cgi.pl?ACTION=surnames",
   "http://www.whatever.xy/cgi-bin/cgi.pl?ACTION=unisearch&MATCHSTRING
+=foo",
   "http://www.whatever.xy/cgi-bin/cgi.pl?ACTION=path&STARTNODE=I1&END
+NODE=I1257",
); 

my $refreshs=0;
my $mech= new WWW::Mechanize; 
foreach my $url (@urls){
   while($refreshs < $maxrefreshs){
      $mech->get($url);
      my $c=$mech->content;
      $debug and print $c; 
      if($c =~/<meta\s+http-equiv="refresh"\s+content="\d+;\s*url=([^"
+]*)"/mi){
         $url=($1 or $url);
         ++$refreshs;
      }else{
         last;
      }
   }
}
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