Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello there,
I am a beginner in Perl, and I have a challenging project:
I have to create a program that checks regularly on an online bank account for new operations, it should then feed a database keeping track of all the money going in and out.
Of course the login details of this online banking access are known.

Could you please share your thoughts with us here on how to do that?
Which libraries or CPAN modules should I look at?
I guess this program will vary very much depending on how the online bank account is built, but what are the main rules when you want to automatically grab data from a website protected with personal access codes?

Many thanks for your help and keep up the great work!

Well at a minimum I think your going to need cURL. I've tried something similar using php a few years back, but I would imagine that banking sites would be on a whole new level, they are likely to have all sorts of tricks to stop this type of thing.

I would personally be very scared of having any sort of automated script accessing my banking information, especially one coded by a Perl beginner.

Thank you for the advice,

I especially take good note of the piece on web banking and security!
Let's say now that I will only collect and use data from the manually downloaded XL spreadsheet from the internet banking.
What module would you use to extract this data from the XL bank statement?
Many thanks for your help and keep up the great work!

Do you mean MS Excel format? If so you'll need Spreadsheet-ParseExcel

But I'd advise trying to export the info in CSV or XML format if at all possible, as it would be far less difficult.

Don't overlook the mobile m.sites for banks, where the dialog and pages are much simpler.

I think the PERL with GNU-Cash does this sort of thing already, and it is free.