advanced cURL problem ?

I am curling a site that sets a session cookie. When i enable cookie prompting in IE 6 it shows me the session cookie and asks if i want it set. but when i curl to the exact same URL it does not show up in the headers. i also think i am using the cookie options correctly... THIS CALL JUST HITS THE SITE TO SET A SESSION. $ch = curl_init(); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $original_URL_that starts_my session); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, 'cookies.txt'); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, 'cookies.txt'); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1); $curl_result = curl_exec($ch); << I parse the result looking for header cookie or whatever for session id set it to $SID >> THIS PIECE CALLS THE AREA REQUIRING THE SESSION TO BE SET (as you see i attempt $SID) $ch2 = curl_init(); curl_setopt($ch2, CURLOPT_URL, $new_URL_that_requires_session); curl_setopt($ch2, CURLOPT_POST, 1); curl_setopt($ch2, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $vars); curl_setopt($ch2, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']); curl_setopt($ch2, CURLOPT_REFERER, 'somewhere.com'); curl_setopt($ch2, CURLOPT_COOKIE, "JSESSIONID=$SID"); curl_setopt($ch2, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, 'cookies.txt'); curl_setopt($ch2, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, 'cookies.txt'); curl_setopt($ch2, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1); curl_setopt($ch2, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1); curl_setopt($ch2, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); curl_setopt($ch2, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1); $curl_result = curl_exec ($ch2); Please could someone show me a curl method that retains or at least returns them in the result ? I cant get the session id to show up anywhere ? any suggestions that someone has used to set session cookies ? really i just need to retrieve the session cookie being set. i have it working if i go to the page with my real browser. prompt for the cookie variable to ask. grab the value from it there, then paste it to my code (as $SID var) and run my script in the same window i just used to get the sid. but i need to automate grabbing that SID from the first block. Thanks, Joel Colombo