Loggin into website with LWP and Perl

Somewhat inexperienced programmer here trying to write a program to log into my courses site and download all the content (lectures homeworks etc). Obviously it is a password protected site so I have to give it that. I understand LWP::UserAgent and the likes well enough, and that I need to use credentials. What I cannot figure out is how to get to the next page. I can go to the log-in, but how does perl get the result of my log-in?

code example (i pulled out the log-info obviously):

use LWP::UserAgent;

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
my $url = 'login URL';
$ua -> credentials(
  $url,
  '',
  'user',
  'pass'
);
my $response = $ua -&g开发者_开发技巧t;get($url);
print $response->content; 

the content from response is the same content as what I would have got as if I had not passed any credentials. Obviously I'm missing something here....

Oh one other thing my own courses site does not have a unique url as far as I know.

You probably want to be using WWW::Mechanize, a subclass of LWP::UserAgent designed to act more like a browser, allowing you to navigate through pages of a website with cookie storage already taken care of for you.

You only use credentials if the site uses HTTP basic auth, in which case you don't "log in", you just pass the credentials with every request.

If the site has a form based login system, then you need to use cookie_jar and request the form's action URI with whatever data it expects.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use LWP::UserAgent;
use HTTP::Cookies;

my  $ua=LWP::UserAgent->new(timeout => 20);
    $ua->agent('Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; ru; rv:1.9.1.8) Gecko/20100202 MRA 5.5 (build 02842) Firefox/3.5.8');
    $ua->requests_redirectable(0);

my  $cook = HTTP::Cookies->new;
    $ua->cookie_jar($cook);

print = requester('http://urlexample/login.php', 'login=yourlogin&password=pass' )->as_string;

sub requester
{
    my $type = 'GET';
    if($_[1]){$type = 'POST'}   
    my $req = HTTP::Request->new($type => $_[0]);
    $req->content_type('application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8');
    if($_[1]){$req->content($_[1])}
    my $res = $ua->request($req);
    return $res;
}