my decision will be emailed to me

Colleges & Universities Massachusetts Institute of Technology
1

<p>At 12pm tomorrow I won’t be at home, and I will only have my cellphone from which I can access my email but not the internet. Since I won’t be able to get to my decision, I decided to bring my decision to me, or specifically, to my email. In the spirit of MIT, I wrote a short script to access the website at 12:00 and email me the contents of the page :)</p>

<p>/usr/local/bin/wget --no-check-certificate --post-data ‘username=xxxxxx&password=xxxxxx&buttonClick=Confirm’ <a href=“MIT Admissions”>MIT Admissions;
/usr/local/bin/html2text verify.php >decision.txt
/usr/bin/mail -s decision my@email < decision.txt</p>

<p>Hopefully some of you will be amused ;)</p>

2

<p>Lol, nice, I have same problem so I’m curious, how do I make this execute at 12? And if due to server traffic the website isn’t up when the program tries to access it will it try again until the page come up? I’m computer illiterate but would like to set this up, so any help is appreciated. Thanks.</p>

3

<p>It’s a Linux script, and I’m guessing you aren’t running Linux, so it won’t work. Sorry. :(</p>

<p>(for those who are, set up a cron job to run at 12)</p>

4

<p>It’s a unix script, and so it will run on any well-designed operating system (Linux, OS X, etc… ;)), but windows is out unless you use cygwin. I’m specifically running this on FreeBSD using “at” to execute it at noon. This isn’t for the faint of heart.</p>

5

<p>Does wget manage SSL/TLS for you (looks like it does)? Anyway, good job, but I’ll laugh if the server crashes at 12 and your script fails :stuck_out_tongue: jk, but you might want to have it run a few times every five minutes or so.</p>

6

<p>verify.php isn’t the script you’re trying to post to; verify.php only verifies your account information.</p>

<p>I’d personally do something like this to be fully foolproof:</p>

<p>perl -MWWW::Mechanize -e ‘$ua=WWW::Mechanize->new(); $ua->get("<a href="MIT Admissions); print $ua->submit<em>form(form</em>number=>1,fields => {username => “username”, password => “password”})->as_string();’</p>

<p>edit: hrm, you may want to handle meta refresh tags too. How to do that is an exercise left up to the reader.
edit2: what’s better is if you set it to text message you; email to <a href="mailto:yournumber@teleflip.com">yournumber@teleflip.com</a> or something</p>

7

<p>Well, my event was canceled due to the snow in the northeast, so looks like I won’t be needing my script. It was fun writing it though.</p>