I'm most interested in ways around using a cookie-jar file on the disk, and detecting new cookies.

I'm pretty sure HTTP::Cookies doesn't require the use of a file. Just don't specify one and it won't use one.

LWP::UserAgent doesn't really care a whole lot about what you use as a cookie jar. The only requirements are that the object has two methods:

1. extract_cookies() must take an HTTP::Request object.
2. add_cookie_header() must take an HTTP::Response object.

So, one way to do this would be to write a simple wrapper class around HTTP::Cookies that performed the translation. I would prefer this approach to subclassing HTTP::Cookies as was suggested by jdporter. It wouldn't require you to dig into the guts, just the docs. ;-)

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";