Re: Checking "incomplete" URLs

My question is how do I get LWP useragent to act like a browser and find the default page in a directory?

It has nothing to do with your browser, and everything to do with your web server. I tested your example on a site I had control of (running apache). Here's what happened:

[jon@valium jon]$ telnet divisionbyzero.com 80
Trying 168.103.109.84...
Connected to divisionbyzero.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET /decss HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2002 02:47:50 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.22 (Unix)  (Red-Hat/Linux) mod_ssl/2.8.5 OpenSSL/0.
+9.6b mod_perl/1.24_01
Location: http://www.divisionbyzero.com/decss/
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<TITLE>301 Moved Permanently</TITLE>
</HEAD><BODY>
<H1>Moved Permanently</H1>
The document has moved <A HREF="http://www.divisionbyzero.com/decss/">
+here</A>.<P>
<HR>
<ADDRESS>Apache/1.3.22 Server at www.divisionbyzero.com Port 80</ADDRE
+SS>
</BODY></HTML>
Connection closed by foreign host.
[download]

The web server sent me a 301 since /decss wasn't an actual file, but rather, a directory. My web browser followed that redirect automatically, which is what browsers are supposed to do when the http method used is GET or HEAD. I suspect your troubles are caused because you are using the POST method, which is explicitly forbidden to redirect you without notifying the user.

BlueLines

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