Abstract
RunUrl is a command line utility to issue network requests on remote web servers. The program was designed to retrieve a web page or graphic from a remote site and optionally store it on the local file system.

Purpose / Problem Solved
We have several web applications written in different languages (ASP, JSP, PHP) and platforms (Windows, Linux) that contain maintenance scripts that the user can run via their web browser. We needed a way run these web scripts unattended via a scheduled process (Windows schedule service, Linux cron job).

By using RunUrl, we are able to "run" the web page scripts without writing extra platform specific code (Windows Scripting Host, IE automation) to perform existing functionality.

Usage:
c:\>java RunUrl <web-url> [<filename>]

Where:
<web-url> = web page request including protocol
<filename> = [optional] the name of the local file to save the results

RunUrl creates a log file named "RunUrl.log" that logs the time, URL and content size of each request.

Examples:
1. Download the Google news page and save to a local file named GoogleNews.htm
   c:\>java RunUrl http://news.google.com GoogleNews.htm

2. Download the Yahoo weather logo and save to a local file named WeatherImage.gif
   c:\>java RunUrl http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/us/we/we4c.gif WeatherImage.gif

3. Run some arbitrary web script but do not save the results to a file
   c:\>java RunUrl http://www.myserver.com/myscript.asp