Press a html button via shell script?

Question

i am currently trying to write a script to change some parameters on a webpage via a shell script. I can change the values in the textboxes without any problems, but i can't seem to figure out how i can "press" the Apply button.

This is how i change the values, as you can see i need one final "Apply" button press.

setJitterDelay()
{
    rate=${1}
    if [ "${rate}" == "low" ]; then
            ((htmlJitterNegDelta = 5))
            ((htmlJitterPosDelta = 5))
            ((htmlJitterDelayMax = 10))
            jDelta=5
    else
            if [ "${rate}" == "med" ]; then
                    ((htmlJitterNegDelta = 25))
                    ((htmlJitterPosDelta = 25))
                    ((htmlJitterDelayMax = 50))
                    jDelta=25
            else
                    if [ "${rate}" == "high" ]; then
                            ((htmlJitterNegDelta = 50))
                            ((htmlJitterPosDelta = 50))
                            ((htmlJitterDelayMax = 100))
                            jDelta=50
                    else
                            echo "error: low, med, high not selected! Skipped..."
                            return
                    fi
            fi
    fi
    ### APPLY BUTTON
}

I used Firebug to know which values i had to change and the Apply button says this:

  <input id="appFlowBw" type="submit" value="Apply" name="appFlowBw">
<form action="http://wanemu/XGEM_REV_BW_FLOW?blade=1&profile=0" method="post" name="rev_bw_form"></form>

The input is inside the form in the source code:

             <TR>
          <TD colspan="8"></TD>
          <TD><INPUT type="submit" name="appFlowBw" id="appFlowBw" value="Apply" disabled></TD>
      </FORM>

But i don't know how i can now "press" this button.

I hope you understand my problem and can help.

//edit: added form

Answer 1

Pressing this button will only cause the browser to submit a POST request to the server, together with all the values of the according form as payload in the body of the request.

So if you want the effect of this click reproduced in a shell script, what you have to do is to build your data in the format it's passed in a POST request, and then submit a POST to the server to emulate the pressing of the button.

It should be quite easy to do this with curl, just like described here: What is the cURL command-line syntax to do a POST request?

Example:

curl --data "param1=value1&param2=value2" http://example.com/resource.cgi