Shell Programming and Scripting

I've written a program using the bourne shell (I think)

Code:

#!/bin/bash

that goes through a database and for each line does

Code:

lynx "http://www.example.com/test.cgi?var=variable"

The whole point of this was to later move it into the crontab so that once a day it would run this program on a website. Now that I've gotten all the bugs out, I can open my terminal and run the program. It comes up with the website using lynx and tells me I'm successful. However, when I moved it into the crontab it sent me an email saying Your terminal lacks the ability to clear the screen or position the cursor. I typed man lynx to see if there were any ways around this, and couldn't find any. It said something about -term, but I couldn't find enough info about it for it to make sense to me. Is there some way to make the program think my terminal does have those abilities, or to make it ignore that completely? Or maybe even make the program open up a terminal window and then run? I've searched this forum and other sites and my Unix in a Nutshell book, but can't find anything. Thanks a lot for your help and for having the patience to read this far!

lynx is a curses program - it usually assumes that you're running it interactively.
I use lynx in a few script that poll some monitoring web pages to make sure they themselves are up and properly configured. I use a combination of -dump and -source, and redirect either to a file. If you don't care what the page looks like, you could just do:

Code:

lynx -dump "http://www.example.com/test.cgi?var=variable" >/dev/null 2>&1

Otherwise, redirect it to a file for perusal later.

I was soooo happy for about two minutes! I added the -dump to my line of code and when I ran the program manually, it put the successful text in my specified file. But, when I put my program in the crontab, it put the dreaded Your terminal lacks the ability to clear the screen or position the cursor. phrase in my specified file. I can't believe how much of a pain this is being! Do you know of another program I could use other than lynx to gain my desired results? Thanks for your help so far LivinFree!

I think I got it with

Code:

wget -q "http://www.example.com/test.cgi?var=variable"

Thanks for your help LivinFree!

Ahh, there you go! wget is something I forgot all about.
Actually, mine is wrapped in a shell script - that may be the issue if you're calling it directly from crontab.

But no worries now, wget is here to save the day!