lynx-dev Cookies broken with -source?

[Keith Doyle]

Howdy,

I've been using Lynx for some simple automated web interactions
and for the most part it works great.  But I've discovered a 
behaviour in 2.8.1rel.2 on the netcom Sun machines that seems 
like it may be a bug.

If I use Lynx normally to visit a site where a password cookie
is used, things work fine.  Once the server has sent its
cookie in one Lynx session, I can thereafter get directly to 
a cookie passworded page via a single explicit invocation of 
Lynx with the URL of the specific page of interest.

However, if I add -source to the invocation, Lynx does not
send the cookies in the header.  From the trace file, I
find that after the "LYCookie: Searching for" line in the
normal case, there are a series of "Checking cookie xxxxx"
entries, and then ultimately the all-important "HTTP: Sending Cookie:"
entry.  In the -source case, these "Checking cookie xxxxx"
entries do not appear in the trace file and subsequently nether
does the "HTTP: Sending Cookie:".  I did notice some 
logic in LYCookie.c that seems to be bypassing some of this
stuff when "dump" is on for some reason, but I don't 
know why it would ever need to do that.

So is this a bug or a feature?  Can I work around it without
having to build a private copy of Lynx on my ISP's machine
which takes up precious disk space?  For example, could
I hand craft these Cookie: header entries and somehow get
them added to the headers using -get_data or something?

And of course that brings up a more general issue-- is it
possible to add some custom header info into a Lynx generated
header-- beyond the usual get and post data?

If the only solution is to rebuild Lynx, should I just fake
out the LYCookie.c stuff to think it is not doing a dump?
Any idea what might break if I did?  Does anyone have any 
idea how I can fix it so that it will be consistent with 
future releases?

Please don't recommend I use wget or one of those things, 
as I have no interest in going to Perl for this sort of stuff,
wonderful as it may be-- I think it is overkill when 
shell is more than enough to do the job.  I've used other
stand alone utilities such as snarf and the like, but
I happen to like how Lynx handles its timeouts better 
than those other things when a "get" seems to hang, which
happens often enough.  And Lynx handles redirects far
better.  I've been slowly replacing snarf and similar 
tools I've been using with Lynx after I found out it had
the -source feature.  If I can get Lynx to do this for
me, I won't need much of anything else-- it's a great
program.


Keith Doyle
address@hidden