Hi scarfguy,

Do the contents of the HTML file you download give you a hint as to what is going wrong?

It's been a while since I worked with Mechanize, so someone else might have a quicker solution handy, but my first thought was to use Wireshark to record a normal, successful session from the browser and compare that to what Mechanize is doing. Perhaps there is a redirect happening that Mechanize isn't dealing with, or the server has a mechanism in place to detect automated downloads, or some header isn't getting set the right way, or something else...

Update: Actually, the AM is probably right, why are you switching from WWW::Mechanize to LWP::Simple? You lose any cookies or referrers that logging in with Mechanize gains you.

Regards,
-- Hauke D

Losing the cookies. That's probably why the downloaded page is the logout page! I could not figure out why. Thank you, I will try Mechanize and report back.

Any thoughts?

stick with WWW::Mechanize, LWP::Simple is too simple

Also, study the mechanize faq, use firefox+livehttpheaders/wireshark, figure out what headers you need to send , what cookie setting web bugs you need to load, what urls you need to access...

there is no windows, just urls, no secret except trace the http

Thank you guys! It works with:

$mech -> get($downloadURI);
$mech -> save_content($fileName);
[download]

I thought LWP::Simple was the standard way to download stuff with perl. The problem really was the loss of the cookies.