You could use the WWW::Mechanize module to save the page locally, you could then compare it against the saved page from a previous run. If the page in question requires JavaScript see WWW::Mechanize::FAQ for a list of alternative modules.

My suggestion is to skip fetching the page using the excellent Mech module, and just do a HEAD on the URL, using some combination of the -i (If-Modified-Since) and the -o text (text output) options.

This approach might not work because the vast majority of dynamically generated web pages (if the page in question is one) don't bother with the If-Modified-Since header and just return the whole page for a GET request.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use HTTP::Request::Common qw(GET);
use LWP::UserAgent;

my $url ='https://zentara.zentara.net/~zentara/zentara1.avi';
my $filename = substr( $url, rindex( $url, "/" ) + 1 );
#print "$filename\n";
open( IN, ">$filename" ) or die $!;

my $user = 'zentara';
my $pass = 'foobar';

my $expected_length;
my $bytes_received = 0;

my $ua = new LWP::UserAgent;
$ua->protocols_allowed( [ 'https'] );

 #setup request
 my $req = GET($url); 
 $req->authorization_basic($user, $pass);

#do it         
 my $response = $ua->request($req);

 if ($response->is_error())
            {
                    printf " %s\n", $response->status_line;
                    print "https request error!\n";
            } else {
                    my $content = $response->content();
                    print IN $content;
                }

  print $response->status_line;

close IN;
exit;
[download]

Thank you for your replies. The form I need to login is at https://secure.dutysheet.com/ I think it uses cookies to store login credentials. When I use the above method by Zentara it just copies the login page to the file. Cheers, Neil.

I don't know if it will get you past the login page, but it's worth a try. To my code above, add a cookie jar.

my $jar = HTTP::Cookies->new;
$ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
$ua->cookie_jar($jar);
[download]

If that don't work, you will need WWW::Mechanize. See WWW:::Mechanize and credentials and WWW::Mechanize to Access HTTPS with Cookies for basic outlines of what you need to do.

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I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.
Old Perl Programmer Haiku ................... flash japh