Thanks for all the responses. For now I got it working a crude way with iMacros which is available as a firefox addon. I do have to launch firefox for this to work. A few iMacros commands do the job, while they are wrapped in a javascript that keeps looping with certain time delay. One needs a few clicks in firefox to launch this javascript. (Found, there is no way a background job could just quietly launch a firefox session and get these things done. May be that's possible with standalone version of iMacros which is not freely available.)
I do want to try some of the more elegant solutions suggested on this thread when time permits. Just responding here to some of them: curl-loader: Looks a promising thing. Whatever I have done on top of firefox should be achievable with it, though will just need some time to figure it out. With respect to their application, iMacros and curl-loader have some similarities. BTW one thing I did not like about the latter is it must be run as root. The server does send some random hidden fields every time you go to the page. So figuring out exact post and how it is formed is likely to be a little painful though should be possible. (One can also reverse engineer the java scripts on login page to figure some things out.) ISP does not offer scriptable interface. Their technical people confirmed that. Thanks everyone again. Mayuresh. _______________________________________ Pune GNU/Linux Users Group Mailing List