Red Hat / Fedora :: Automate Testing Of Web Login?

I am trying to automate testing of logon into a web application using "curl". as the first step i am doing below to see if i can login to the app from command linecurl --verbose --user usernameassword my.url.combut it does not seem to be working. from the output that i get it seems it only gets to the page where to enter my username/password. but does not get past that stage. below are the first few lines from the output

curl --verbose --user administrator my.url.com
Enter host password for user 'administrator':
* About to connect() to my.url.com port 7790

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