Book Image

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

Book Image

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

Overview of this book

The shell remains one of the most powerful tools on a computer system — yet a large number of users are unaware of how much one can accomplish with it. Using a combination of simple commands, we will see how to solve complex problems in day to day computer usage.Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition will take you through useful real-world recipes designed to make your daily life easy when working with the shell. The book shows the reader how to effectively use the shell to accomplish complex tasks with ease.The book discusses basics of using the shell, general commands and proceeds to show the reader how to use them to perform complex tasks with ease.Starting with the basics of the shell, we will learn simple commands with their usages allowing us to perform operations on files of different kind. The book then proceeds to explain text processing, web interaction and concludes with backups, monitoring and other sysadmin tasks.Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition serves as an excellent guide to solving day to day problems using the shell and few powerful commands together to create solutions.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Posting to a web page and reading the response


POST and GET are two types of requests in HTTP to send information to, or retrieve information from a website. In a GET request, we send parameters (name-value pairs) through the webpage URL itself. In the case of POST , it won't be attached with the URL. POST is used when a form needs to be submitted. For example, a username, the password to be submitted, and the login page to be retrieved.

Posting to pages is used frequently while writing scripts based on webpage retrievals. Let us see how to work with POST. Automating the HTTP GET and POST request by sending the POST data and retrieving the output is a very important task that we practice while writing shell scripts that parse data from websites.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we will use a test website (http://book.sarathlakshman.com/lsc/mlogs/), which is used to submit the current user information, such as the hostname and username. In the home page of the website, there are two fields HOSTNAME...