CURL to access a page that requires a login from a different page

Also you might want to log in via browser and get the command with all headers including cookies:

Open the Network tab of Developer Tools, log in, navigate to the needed page, use "Copy as cURL".

The web site likely uses cookies to store your session information. When you run

curl --user user:pass https://xyz.example/a  #works ok
curl https://xyz.example/b #doesn't work

curl is run twice, in two separate sessions. Thus when the second command runs, the cookies set by the 1st command are not available; it's just as if you logged in to page a in one browser session, and tried to access page b in a different one.

What you need to do is save the cookies created by the first command:

curl --user user:pass --cookie-jar ./somefile https://xyz.example/a

and then read them back in when running the second:

curl --cookie ./somefile https://xyz.example/b

Alternatively you can try downloading both files in the same command, which I think will use the same cookies.

After some googling I found this:

curl -c cookie.txt -d "LoginName=someuser" -d "password=somepass" https://oursite/a
curl -b cookie.txt https://oursite/b

No idea if it works, but it might lead you in the right direction.