[nycbug-talk] silly snarf tricks

[Mikel King]

    A while back I was playing around with snarf which is a command line 
utility for pulling web content...Ok so no real big deal there FreeBSD 
has fetch which does the same thing. However snarf is cool in that you 
can drop a switch that tells it to return a precompiled HTTP_USER_AGENT.

    Now aside from messing with my web developers heads a bit, cause I 
modified the code to return a (Mozilla 5; on a Banana Jr 2000...) and 
lately I've changed it to match my FreeBSD 5.1 install on my laptop. 
Then I scripted it in a cron job to run once a minute and grab 5 pages 
from our company website. OK this really screwed with the web 
stats...but it was harmless fun. I mean we now get 3800 hits per day 
from a machine pretending to be Mozilla 1.6 on FreeBSD 5.1.

    I guess what I am wondering is if anyone can devise a praticle use 
for this?

    I did use it to scriptout a daily pull of the intelligent updater 
from Symantec, and place it into my companies ftp server. But that's 
really nothing magical...

    ideas?

-- 
Cheers,
m!