On Thu, 15 Jun 2000, Tim wrote:

> Thanks for the reply but do you perhaps know where I can find out the
> format of my account number and pin that I need to pass on to curl?

Ok, without knowing what bank you're using or how it works, I'll tell you how
another bank I know of would do this:

1. Using my certificate I get to view a "login-page" on the secure web
   server.

2. The login-page is a plain HTML form page where I enter my PIN and my
   "account number"(1)

3. I press the 'login'-button and now I am logged in to my bank.

4. It allows me to transfer money, pay bills, buy stocks or view my accounts.

In a curl view, you'd have to get page (1), extract the form data (possibly
my using by formfind.pl script). When you know the names of the form fields
to fill in, you can post the (2) information and by doing that it is like
doing the pressing of the login button (3).

In my case, item (4) would be a case where I'd have to follow links and/or do
posts to items that are displayed to me in HTML. To know for sure how to do
this, I'd have to study the outputs to know which pages that should be
fetched or how to do the particilar form submits.

And a word of advice, watch out for cookie usage. You should probably fetch
all these pages in a sequential order and you should store the headers in a
file that you use in the following request as a cookie input file.

> Could you also advise me on where I can find URLs to explain to me how
> the transactions work?

Transactions for curl or for the bank? Doing curl operations to "fake"
browser works is just work, you get the first page and study that in order to
know how to make the second request. Then you do the second request and study
the result in order to be able to do the third etc.

Doing this with a bank is no different than using curl to login to your web
based email account, sending SMS through a web based sms gateway or any other
multi-page operation you use curl for.

Curl brings all the pieces, you have to put them together in a bigger
picture.

-- 
      Daniel Stenberg - http://daniel.haxx.se - +46-705-44 31 77
   ech`echo xiun|tr nu oc|sed 'sx\([sx]\)\([xoi]\)xo un\2\1 is xg'`ol