Re: lynx-dev Cookies broken with -source?

[Klaus Weide]

On Mon, 22 Feb 1999, Keith Doyle wrote:

> I've been using Lynx for some simple automated web interactions
> and for the most part it works great.  But I've discovered a 
> behaviour in 2.8.1rel.2 on the netcom Sun machines that seems 
> like it may be a bug.
> 
> If I use Lynx normally to visit a site where a password cookie
> is used, things work fine.  Once the server has sent its
> cookie in one Lynx session, I can thereafter get directly to 
> a cookie passworded page via a single explicit invocation of 
> Lynx with the URL of the specific page of interest.
> 
> However, if I add -source to the invocation, Lynx does not
> send the cookies in the header.  [...]

That should work now as expected in the development code from
<http://sol.slcc.edu/lynx/current/>.  (Except that in some of
the non-interactive modes the cookie file may not get updated
at the end of the "session" - maybe a feature instead of a
bug.)

> So is this a bug or a feature?  Can I work around it without
> having to build a private copy of Lynx on my ISP's machine
> which takes up precious disk space?  For example, could
> I hand craft these Cookie: header entries and somehow get
> them added to the headers using -get_data or something?
> 
> And of course that brings up a more general issue-- is it
> possible to add some custom header info into a Lynx generated
> header-- beyond the usual get and post data?

No - unless you change the code, of course.  If you want to
add arbitrary headers, something linke junkbuster may be more
appropriate.

> [...]  I've used other
> stand alone utilities such as snarf and the like, but
> I happen to like how Lynx handles its timeouts better 
> than those other things when a "get" seems to hang, which
> happens often enough.  And Lynx handles redirects far
> better.

Interesting - I didn't know lynx was better at these things.

   Klaus