lwp-request

LWP-REQUEST(1)        User Contributed Perl Documentation       LWP-REQUEST(1)



NAME
       lwp-request - Simple command line user agent

SYNOPSIS
        lwp-request [-aeEdvhx] [-m method] [-b <base URL>] [-t <timeout>]
                    [-i <if-modified-since>] [-c <content-type>] [-C <credentials>]
                    [-p <proxy-url>] [-o <format>] <url>...

DESCRIPTION
       This program can be used to send requests to WWW servers and your local
       file system. The request content for POST and PUT methods is read from
       stdin.  The content of the response is printed on stdout.  Error mes-
       sages are printed on stderr.  The program returns a status value indi-
       cating the number of URLs that failed.

       The options are:

       -m <method>
           Set which method to use for the request.  If this option is not
           used, then the method is derived from the name of the program.

       -f  Force request through, even if the program believes that the method
           is illegal.  The server might reject the request eventually.

       -b <uri>
           This URI will be used as the base URI for resolving all relative
           URIs given as argument.

       -t <timeout>
           Set the timeout value for the requests.  The timeout is the amount
           of time that the program will wait for a response from the remote
           server before it fails.  The default unit for the timeout value is
           seconds.  You might append "m" or "h" to the timeout value to make
           it minutes or hours, respectively.  The default timeout is '3m',
           i.e. 3 minutes.

       -i <time>
           Set the If-Modified-Since header in the request. If time is the
           name of a file, use the modification timestamp for this file. If
           time is not a file, it is parsed as a literal date. Take a look at
           HTTP::Date for recognized formats.

       -c <content-type>
           Set the Content-Type for the request.  This option is only allowed
           for requests that take a content, i.e. POST and PUT.  You can force
           methods to take content by using the "-f" option together with
           "-c".  The default Content-Type for POST is "applica-
           tion/x-www-form-urlencoded".  The default Content-type for the oth-
           ers is "text/plain".

       -p <proxy-url>
           Set the proxy to be used for the requests.  The program also loads
           proxy settings from the environment.  You can disable this with the
           "-P" option.

       -H <header>
           Send this HTTP header with each request. You can specify several,
           e.g.:

               lwp-request \
                   -H 'Referer: http://other.url/' \
                   -H 'Host: somehost' \
                   http://this.url/

       -C <username>:<password>
           Provide credentials for documents that are protected by Basic
           Authentication.  If the document is protected and you did not spec-
           ify the username and password with this option, then you will be
           prompted to provide these values.

       The following options controls what is displayed by the program:

       -u  Print request method and absolute URL as requests are made.

       -U  Print request headers in addition to request method and absolute
           URL.

       -s  Print response status code.  This option is always on for HEAD
           requests.

       -S  Print response status chain. This shows redirect and authorization
           requests that are handled by the library.

       -e  Print response headers.  This option is always on for HEAD
           requests.

       -d  Do not print the content of the response.

       -o <format>
           Process HTML content in various ways before printing it.  If the
           content type of the response is not HTML, then this option has no
           effect.  The legal format values are; text, ps, links, html and
           dump.

           If you specify the text format then the HTML will be formatted as
           plain latin1 text.  If you specify the ps format then it will be
           formatted as Postscript.

           The links format will output all links found in the HTML document.
           Relative links will be expanded to absolute ones.

           The html format will reformat the HTML code and the dump format
           will just dump the HTML syntax tree.

           Note that the "HTML-Tree" distribution needs to be installed for
           this option to work.  In addition the "HTML-Format" distribution
           needs to be installed for -o text or -o ps to work.

       -v  Print the version number of the program and quit.

       -h  Print usage message and quit.

       -x  Extra debugging output.

       -a  Set text(ascii) mode for content input and output.  If this option
           is not used, content input and output is done in binary mode.

       Because this program is implemented using the LWP library, it will only
       support the protocols that LWP supports.

SEE ALSO
       lwp-mirror, LWP

COPYRIGHT
       Copyright 1995-1999 Gisle Aas.

       This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
       under the same terms as Perl itself.

AUTHOR
       Gisle Aas <gisle@aas.no>



perl v5.8.6                       2007-07-19                    LWP-REQUEST(1)