Shell Programming and Scripting

I'm a scripting newbie and I'm trying to learn. No better way than being assigned a project.

So basically, I'm trying to come up with a script that can periodically check a URL and then notify when changes occur to the file.

So what I'm thinking is that I need to devise a PERL script that can:
I haven't gotten very far. So far I've got:

Code:

#!/usr/bin/perl

system ('wget -O tempfile.txt "http://www.google.com"'); 
@lines = <tempfile.txt>

Which seems to get the file and save it to tempfile.txt, but it's not counting the lines.


From what I've been reading, I think I need to use PRINT in order to print the number of lines to a document.... but I'm kind of hung up at this point.


Anyone feel like lending a hand?


Thanks

There are already free web sites that do that for you and send an email.

I would wget into cksum and save the cksum, size and url in a sorted file. Make a new sorted file on the next pass and compare files using "comm -13 old new | while read cksum sz url ;do ... done". Add files with a 0 length and 0 cksum, and the next pass will update them, but sensing a pair of zeros, it knows to not notify.

The site that I'm trying to monitor requires login credentials and therefore I can't use any of the free programs out there. I need to write something that can be run on my box, in my IE window so that my credentials are used.

After speaking with a developer, he said my biggest issue would be getting my script to actually save the webpage from IE (View Source > Save). He says wget won't work because the interaction needs to be from the IE browser and not from the script.

I have a script already that opens a particular URL in an IE window...

Apparently what I now need to figure out is how to get the script to save the page as a text file....

I think you can put the return data into a JAVASCRIPT container. The flow for a get is pretty simple. You have to open it like a soap service does. Something like this: get web page text via javascript - Stack Overflow