[nycbug-talk] silly snarf tricks

[Mikel King]

Pete Wright wrote:

> Mikel King wrote:
>
>>    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...
>>
> hey who said messing with web devs was not a practicle use ;)  
> seriously tho, i would imagine that this was developed to help get 
> past buggy sites that only allow IE/NT to access files.  do you think 
> it would allow you grab files from windows update?  prolly not tho b/c 
> of all the ActiveX scripts etc...
>
> -p
>
I don't know, I mean with symantec thingie had to go through a couple of 
awk stages before I could grab the right file, but it's pretty 
reliable...like ronco...set it and foget it....;-) sure would be nice to 
figure out a way around the ms updates thingie...hmmm ok the wheels are 
turning...

-- 
Cheers,
Mikel King
Optimized Computer Solutions, INC
39 West Fourteenth Street
Second Floor
New York, NY 10011
http://www.ocsny.com

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