Shell Programming and Scripting

From my OpenBSD firewall I use PERL to reboot my cable modem around 3:00 am. I do this daily to obtain a new IP from my ISP otherwise I end up with a static IP for weeks. The procedure I use:

Send modem GET command with username and password to login. (unable to send a POST only GET)
After login send GET command to get webpage (HTML) that contains the sessionKey.
Note: I parse this page using PERL to get the sessionKey. (token value)
Send POST command to modem with sessionKey and reboot command to reboot modem. (sessionKey is required)

PERL is installed in the base install of OpenBSD. So I use this along with PERL module HTTP::Tiny to achieve the above. I was using PERL module HTML::TokeParser::Simple to parse the webpage (HTML) from the GET command I send to obtain the sessionKey (token value) that I send in my POST command.

The reason I asked the question reference parsing the HTML using PERL is that by default HTML::TokeParser::Simple isn't installed on OpenBSD by default and I had to install that as a package. I was just trying to find another means.

Excellent explaination.

Thanks.

Had you tried my earlier suggestion, it worked. With one correction -- the HTML you posted was wrong, the tag is not named 'token', it is named 'sessionKey'.

So my final code:

Code:

$ awk -f yanx.awk -e 'TAG == "INPUT" && ARGS["NAME"]=="sessionKey" { print ARGS["VALUE"] }' ORS="\n" my.html
1685540303

$

I intentionally changed the tag to token for the same reason I didn't want to post the entire html page here. It's my cable modem reboot page. I do appreciate your feedback and the yanx.awk solution you provided. I didn't really want want to deal with an additional file (yanx.awk) that I needed to keep track of for future use though.