Question

I’m trying to send a post request through curl so I ran

curl --cookie /tmp/cookies.txt --cookie-jar /tmp/cookies.txt --data "name=value" http://www.mysite.com > post_request.txt 

where I stored in /tmp/cookies.txt the cookie I found in my chrome’s console. In the latter there were a name and a value. Is there a specific format I should use to write the cookie parameters in /tmp/cookies.txt? (because I only put the value and it didn’t work)

Answer 1

Looking at the man page for curl it says:

The file format of the file to read cookies from should be plain HTTP headers or the Netscape/Mozilla cookie file format.

Looking up the mozilla format you find:

http://xiix.wordpress.com/2006/03/23/mozillafirefox-cookie-format/

<domain> <TRUE|FALSE> <PATH> <TRUE|FALSE> <TIMESTAMP> <NAME> <VALUE>

(tab delimited)

Domain: the domain that set & can subsequently read the cookie. This
could include subdomains, e.g., .google.com means that
local.google.com, news.google.com, whatever.google.com could possibly
read the cookie, based on the next flag.

Flag: either TRUE or FALSE, whether or not all machines under that
domain can read the cookie’s information.

Path: the root path under the domain where the cookie is valid. If
this is /, the cookie is valid for the entire domain.

Secure Flag: either TRUE or FALSE, whether or not a secure connection
(HTTPS) is required to read the cookie.

Expiration Timestamp: the “Unix Time” in seconds when the cookie is
set to expire.

Name: the name of the value that the cookie is storing/saving.

Value: the value

(You could of course also just use the plain HTTP headers as stated.)