Shell Programming and Scripting

I am trying to write a shell script to use curl in order to automate downloading data from a website. The URL with the post form is here: http://try-db.org/de/InfoBySpecies.php .

I have a list of about 1800 different species I want to check. For Example, choose the first species and use the Queries option "Measurement table ...". The resulting page will contain a html table with the data. Getting to this stage would be nice progress, but eventually this script needs to parse out the download link and download the resulting tab delimited file.

Command:
curl --data "species=29&OutTab=tab1&submit=Submit&dummy=" http://try-db.org/de/InfoBySpecies.php

Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Cheers.

Take a look at the HTML of the resulting page. Getting the table is just a similar form post to DnldTraitMeas.php with an id1 value which is the species number you want.

Considering the species list alone is several megabytes in size, it makes sense to avoid downloading from that main page when it can be avoided.

Thank you for your help. Much appreciated.

I was successfully able to submit my post to with this command: curl -d id1=29 -d submit=Download http://try-db.org/de/DnldTraitMeas.php > 29result.html

The resulting page has the filename of the temporary file that gets created. I can then script out the url to wget the actual tab delimited data.

Cheers