Answer by JuanD for How to restart a router with curl or wget to pass URL as well as POST parameters?

I just came across this article the other day and it is one of the most perfectly explained and demonstrated ways to collect all the info you need to make the 2 calls youd need to a router with authentication. Using Chrome's developer tools you can see what is happening on your browser session while you're on your router and generate the curl commands you would need to execute almost any of the admin screens.

1. the 1st curl is to authenticate and generate an authentication cookie
2. the 2nd is the actual call to the router function passing in the cookie

https://ttytoast.io/use-siri-to-configure-your-asus-router-pt1/

For my router, my curls ended up being:

curl #1 to authenticate:

curl -c /tmp/cookie-jar.txt 'http://192.168.1.1/login.cgi' \  -H 'Connection: keep-alive' \  -H 'Cache-Control: max-age=0' \  -H 'Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1' \  -H 'Origin: http://192.168.1.1' \  -H 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded' \  -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/85.0.4183.121 Safari/537.36' \  -H 'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9' \  -H 'Referer: http://192.168.1.1/Main_Login.asp' \  -H 'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9' \   --data-raw 'group_id=&action_mode=&action_script=&action_wait=5&current_page=Main_Login.asp&next_page=index.asp&login_authorization=SuPeR_SeCrET_hAsH_FroM_cHrOmE'

*obviously "SuPeR_SeCrET_hAsH_FroM_cHrOmE" is not real. Yours will be unique ;-)

curl #2 to whichever link your trying to get to:

curl -b /tmp/cookie-jar.txt 'http://192.168.1.1/Advanced_LAN_Content.asp' \  -H 'Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1' \  -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/85.0.4183.121 Safari/537.36' \  -H 'Referer: http://192.168.1.1/index.asp' \  --compressed

The doc is for an Asus router but really could work for almost any router.

**As good practice, you should curl the log out command to officially close the session too.