Submitting a file to a form on unix via cron

I will GLADLY get someone another 500 points for answering this...

Can you use SSH? If so, you should be able to schedule an scp or rsync command to do the copy, both programs are available in most distributions. rsync would have the added advantage that it would only copy if files had been changed.

To persevere on the HTTP route from PHP, you can use CURL to submit form data via POST. First of all, get your file contents into a variable, then submit it as post data:

<?php
$data = urlencode(file_get_contents('myuploadfile1.txt'));
$URL="http://www.example.com/upload.php";
$ch = curl_init();   
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $URL);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "data=$data");
curl_exec ($ch);    
curl_close ($ch);
?>

You'll need to tweak this to match the upload script on your windows box.

Revised version to match your form example:

<?php
$dbdump = urlencode(file_get_contents('dbdump'));
$dbtracks = urlencode(file_get_contents('dbtracks'));
$URL="http://www.example.com/index.php";
$ch = curl_init();   
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $URL);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "dbdump=$dbdump&dbtracks=$dbtracks");
curl_exec ($ch);    
curl_close ($ch);
?>

so I do not have PHP available either on the unix box.  Do you know if perl might have a similar mod as curl?

probably, but I didn't see a perl forum.  Thanks anyway.  I'll probably try a java cli instead.

The unix box does not have the LWP:UserAgent package installed.

You'd be much better off going with a shell script than Java. Java is monstrously inefficient for small operations like this.

More on installing perl modules as non-root:
http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/tip/html/nonroot.html#AEN931

All of your suggestions were good, but given my limited ability to do anything on the box, including a limited FS size for the home directories, I was forced to go java.

I have included the code that I modified from http://java.sun.com to only upload a single file to a form with a single element.  Currently it only will work well with text files and may need a change to \n's to make them \r\n's.  Haven't had time to fully check it out.  Also, I am sure there is a better way to send contents of a file to an InputStream, but this gets my file there and I am happy.

Thanks for all of your quick and thorough help.

*********************************************************

import java.io.*;
import java.net.*;

public class uploadFile {

  public static void writeFile(DataOutputStream dstream,String filename,String formname) throws Exception {
      File f0 = new File(filename);
      try {
            FileInputStream fi = new FileInputStream(f0);
            dstream.writeBytes("Content-Disposition: form-data; name=\""+formname+"\"; filename=\""+f0.getName()+"\"\r\n");
            dstream.writeBytes("Content-Type: text/plain\r\n\r\n");
            int cnt = fi.read();
            while(cnt!=-1){
                  dstream.write(cnt);
                  cnt = fi.read();
            }
            fi.close();
            dstream.writeBytes("\r\n--****4353\r\n");
      } catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
            System.out.println("File not found: " + f0.getName());
      }
  }

  public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
      if (args.length != 5) {
          System.err.println(
            "Usage:\njava uploadFile http://this/url.php formInputBoxName /path/and/file.name");
          System.exit(1);
      }
      String strURL = args[0]
      URL url = new URL(strURL);
      URLConnection conn = url.openConnection();
      conn.setDoOutput(true);
      conn.setDoInput(true);
      conn.setUseCaches(false);
      conn.setRequestProperty("Connection","Keep-Alive");
      conn.setRequestProperty("HTTP_REFERER",strURL);
      conn.setRequestProperty("Content-Type","multipart/form-data; boundary=****4353");
      DataOutputStream dstream = new DataOutputStream(conn.getOutputStream());
      dstream.writeBytes("--****4353\r\n");

      writeFile(dstream,args[1],args[2]);

      dstream.writeBytes("\r\n--****4353--\r\n");
      dstream.flush();
      dstream.close();
      try{
            DataInputStream in = new DataInputStream( new BufferedInputStream(conn.getInputStream()));
            String sIn = in.readLine();
            boolean b = true;
            System.out.println(sIn);
            while(sIn.compareTo("window.close();")!=0){
                  sIn = in.readLine();
                  if(sIn!=null){
                        System.out.println(sIn);
                  }
            }

      } catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
      }
  }
}