CURL to access a page that requires a login from a different page

Question

I have 2 pages: xyz.com/a and xyz.com/b. I can only access xyz.com/b if and only if I login to xyz.com/a first. If access

Answer 1

The web site likely uses cookies to store your session information. When you run

curl --user user:pass https://xyz.com/a  #works ok
curl https://xyz.com/b #doesn't work

curl is run twice, in two separate sessions. Thus when the second command runs, the cookies set by the 1st command are not available; it's just as if you logged in to page a in one browser session, and tried to access page b in a different one.

What you need to do is save the cookies created by the first command:

curl --user user:pass --cookie-jar ./somefile https://xyz.com/a

and then read them back in when running the second:

curl --cookie ./somefile https://xyz.com/b

Alternatively you can try downloading both files in the same command, which I think will use the same cookies.