Too vague? Nonesense!

I'm trying to simulate the action of clicking the "Submit" button

Simple: use LWP::Simple

say you have a CGI script like this (called foo.cgi):

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use CGI;

my $cgi = new CGI;
print $cgi->header;

if (my $foo = $cgi->param('foo')) {
    print "foo = $foo";
}
else {
    print "nothing special";
}
[download]

all this script does is check for a parameter named 'foo' - if found, print it's value, otherwise print some default message.

If you create an HTML document that contains a form that points to this script, and include a text box named 'foo' and a submit button - then when the user clicks the submit button, the value of 'foo' is sent to the script.

So, to automate this behaviour in a Perl script, you can either roll out your own socket code, or be cool and use the LWP::Simple CPAN module - which by the way, is not the only module for such a purpose (check out LWP::UserAgent for more advanced control).

Here is the simple web bot:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use LWP::Simple;

print "with no arguments: ";
print get('http://localhost/cgi-bin/foo.cgi'), "\n";

print "with arguments: ";
print get('http://localhost/cgi-bin/foo.cgi?foo=bar'), "\n";
[download]

And that's it.

Jeff

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
F--F--F--F--F--F--F--F--
(the triplet paradiddle)