My guess is that you're not creating the cookie jar in the right manner. I don't think it accepts "name => value" pairs. You need to create a HTTP::Cookies object and use that in LWP's cookie_jar method. Then you can maybe use set_cookie to create a cookie.

I have implemented the same and added the feature of passing the cookie to firefox. Check it out - http://blog.sriunplugged.com/firefox/pass-cookie-script-firefox/

    my $cookie_jar = HTTP::Cookies->new; 
    $cookie_jar->clear; # shouldn't be necessary since object was newl
+y created in above line but this is all experimentation... 
    
    # A variable that holds our POST request to the site
    $ENV{HTTPS_VERSION} = 3;

    my $action = POST 'https://adwords.google.com/select/LoginValidati
+on',
        [ 
            'hl' => $language,
            'login.userid' => $adwordsEmailLogin,
            'login.password' => $adwordsPassword,
             'login' => 'Login'
        ];

    my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
    
    $ua->cookie_jar($cookie_jar);  
    
    # We disguise ourselves as Internet Explorer
    $ua->agent('Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)');
    $ua->timeout(30);
    
    #$ENV{HTTPS_PROXY} = 'http://proxy.host:proxy_port'; #if need prox
+y

    if ($proxy) {
        logMessage( "adwordsLogin: Logging into adwords using proxy $p
+roxy.\n");        
        $ua->proxy('http',$proxy); # should this be https?  No, seems 
+to work as is. # actually, not sure.  check this later.
    }

    my $www = $ua->request( $action );
    
    # In the event that the request to google fails

    my $headers = new HTTP::Headers;
    $headers = $www->headers();
    my $redir = $headers->header('Location'); #target url
    my $action2 = GET 'https://adwords.google.com'.$redir; 
    my $www2 = $ua->request( $action2 );
    unless ($www2->is_success) {
        logMessage( "AdwordsLogin: The error code: " . $www2->code . "
+ was returned!");
    }
    
    $cookie_jar->extract_cookies($www2);

    # Put the HTML into a seperate variable
    #my $content = $www2->content;
    # test
    #open F, "> adwordsLoginResult.html"; print F $content; close F;

    $adwordsLoginTries++;
    return \$cookie_jar;
[download]

I'm slowly going nuts!
Either I'm making this much too difficult or, more likely, I just don't get it. I've read though the above posts and I'm still missing it.

I have a number of .cgi web-pages that use a cookie for user authentication and I sometimes want to access these via LWP (which needs to pass the cookie.)

Here's my latest, not working, version. It runs ok, but it's not passing the cookie.

use strict;
use CGI;
use LWP::UserAgent;
use HTTP::Cookies;
my $q = new CGI;

my $cookie_value = $q->cookie('name'); # Get cookie from bowser

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
my $cookie_jar = HTTP::Cookies->new;

# Pass cookie in LWP.
my $version = ''; # (from CPAN) What's this?
$cookie_jar -> set_cookie($version,'name',$cookie_value,"/"); 

$ua -> cookie_jar($cookie_jar);

my $form_data = [ name => 'value', ];
my $response = $ua->post("http://domain.com/cgi-bin/script.cgi",$form_
+data);

$html = ($response->is_success) ? $response->content : "Page not respo
+nding";
[download]

I'm attempting to do exactly the same thing with no luck.

To clarify: I have a cgi script which attempts to access another cgi script via lwp. The second script does userauthentication using a cookie. So does the first one. Both use the same cookie for authentication. So what I need to do is extract the cookie from the cgi in the first script so that I can pass it to through the HTTP::Request to the second script.

The above code looks like it should work, but doesn't. Can anyone offer advice on this?

Hi raflach,
I struggled with this for a couple more hours and then went to plan 'B'

What I did was to get the cookie value in my initial script and pass it, via a post, to the LWP'd script. I modified my authenication subroutine (saved in a module), to accept first a cookie and, if that failed, get the cookie value from the posted data.

This works well and I do not have to worry about passing cookies. It also has an added bonus. I am now able to run my scripts if cookies are disabled by saving the cookie value in a hidden field.

Some day I'll understand how this cookie_jar thing works :-).

Well, I was trying to do the same thing. Had lots of trouble. Couldn't figure out why until I realized that the file I was trying to initialize with wasn't being loaded.

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
$ua->cookie_jar(HTTP::Cookies::Netscape->new('file' => '<your cookie f
+ile here>' ));

my $url = URI->new( '<your URL here>' );

my $response = $ua->request(HTTP::Request->new(GET => $url));
[download]

but the above code works. If you follow other examples, you'll end up creating a seperate "cookie jar" and attaching it to your user agent. Just make sure your cookie file is being read because nothing really lets you know it didn't work (I'm sure there is a status or something, but I didn't get into the details and it didn't die or anything on its own).

Well, I was trying to do the same thing. Had lots of trouble. Couldn't figure out why until I realized that the file I was trying to initialize wasn't being loaded.

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
$ua->cookie_jar(HTTP::Cookies::Netscape->new('file' => '<your cookie f
+ile here>' ));

my $url = URI->new( '<your URL here>' );

my $response = $ua->request(HTTP::Request->new(GET => $url));
[download]

but the above code works. If you follow other examples, you'll end up creating a seperate "cookie jar" and attaching it to your user agent. Just make sure your cookie file is being read because nothing really lets you know it didn't work (I'm sure there is a status or something, but I didn't get into the details and it didn't die or anything on its own).

Remember that session cookies will be deleted when a browser session ends. It may be the case that you need to get your script to do the login part in order to generate the session cookies that are later used in the script. Check out WWW::Mechanize as a means of logging in using a form etc.