An emailer wondered if siege could be configured to refuse cookies. I had a vague recollection on the matter. My brain cells were all, “Yeah, sure, you can disable cookies.”

The best place to look for more esoteric features is inside $HOME/.siegerc If you don’t have one, you can generate a new one with this command: siege.config That command will place a new one inside your home directory. ‘siege.config’ is designed to build a resource file which is compatible with your version of the program.

I checked the latest version of that file and I found nothing to disable cookies. Really? That seems like a no-brainer. Why wouldn’t we allow users to disable that? “Sorry,” I replied. “Siege can’t disable cookies.”

Yet my own response was bothersome. I was certain you could turn that off so I checked the code with ‘egrep cooki *.c’ Sure enough, siege parses siegerc for ‘cookie’ which accepts true or false. The latter disables cookie support.

Documentation for this feature has been added to siege-3.0.1-beta4. The feature itself is available in just about every contemporary version of siege that’s floating around the Internets. Just add ‘cookies = false’ to your siegerc file to disable their support.