Can I simulate a button press on a web page from terminal

Question

I found that we can read gmail messages from a terminal window by using

curl
curl -u user --silent "https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom"

I would now like to submit some text (from a textarea + button press) from terminal. So what are the steps to identify the action triggered when a button is pressed and how to simulate the same actions in terminal ?

For example, I want to simulate 'pass data' & 'button press' (submit ) of http://tokira.net/unicode/index.php

Answer 1

You can use lynx:

lynx http://tokira.net/unicode/index.php

By default lynx is not installed in Ubuntu, but you can install it with:

sudo apt-get install lynx

Answer 2

If you need something more complex than just submitting a post request (which can easily be done by cURL directly), you may want to check Mechanize, a ruby library for interacting with web pages.