Web browsing without a browser?! ---Need help!

[aristeialeet]

Hello!
I'm new to the forum, so I'd like to say hi first. Alright, to the question!

I believe this is possible, but I don't know where to begin, so even a link that I could read would help. My question is this: I need to access the internet without using a browser of any kind. I'm doing this on a linux server, but it doesn't even have lynx and I cannot get it (or any other programs). The page I will be accessing needs a username / password, and I'll be given a cookie once I enter those into a form (so I need to be able to accept cookies). From there on I need to be able to browse around the website without any GUI... all text based.

To be a little more specific, the username and password I will feed to the webpage will be given to me through my own website, and will be stored using PHP (so I can either call $_SESSION variables or whatever is necessary to retrieve the information). I thought coming to a linux forum would be the place to start, seeing as how I am using a linux terminal. Maybe a forum on web programming, but which one for this type of question? I really have no clue where to begin, so any and all possible help would be amazing! Thank you in advance.

~aristeialeet

[Freston]

I've heard good things about Perl

---------

You may be a newbie on this forum, but this is by no means a newbie question


What you ask is impossible. You want to browse without a browser. That cannot be done. You may not need (or have access to) such an elaborate browser as lynx (I like lynx, it's got a 'back' button and sometimes that's all you need) , but you'll need a browser of some sort.

What you're asking thus is to build your own browser from scratch. Read text on a website and handle cookies is all a browser does. Ok, granted, some play flash, some don't. Your browser may not even need a 'back' function.

If I was any better at scripting I'd help... but alas. This is a bit beyond me.

EDIT: Oops! Welcome to the forum!