I am assured this script runs on a Sun box using a bash shell, but I can’t get it to run on a HP-UX box. It’s intended to sequentially telnet each IP address in a file, get a prompt, run a command, and log the response. On the Sun box each of the telnet sessions automatically close, but on the HP-UX box the first telnet session stays up, and the script hangs. The remote machines won't accept unix commands, so I can’t use rlogin or remsh. Any ideas or suggestions? for IP in `cat IP_list.dat` do (echo "";\ echo "MyCommand";\ echo "exit;";\ sleep 5)|telnet $IP >> MyResult done Thanks in advance

Bash or ksh does not lend themselves to interactive telnet sort of scripts. Have a look at expect.

I'd look into using expect or perl to do this. Here is a link to the perl module i use for this task: http://search.cpan.org/author/JROGERS/Net-Telnet-3.03/lib/Net/Telnet.pm

Thanks for the suggestion, but I’ve never heard of expect, and there is no manual entry for it. Do you have an example? Or where can I get info about it? Thanks again

Expect is part of Tcl. I'm haven't used it much so I want' give you an example, but if you type "man expect" into google you'll find plenty.

http://expect.nist.gov/ #!/usr/bin/expect -f set username "username" set password "password" set n 0 set HOSTNAME "somehost" while { $n < 5 } { spawn "/bin/sh" send "telnet $HOSTNAME\r" sleep 1 expect "ogin" send "$username\r" expect "Password" send "$password\r" send "\r\r" expect { "Welcome" { incr pass0 set n 5 set p 0 send "MyCommand\r" close } "from" { send "id\r" expect { $username { incr pass0 set n 5 close } } } "login: $" { set pass1 0 puts stdout "Expect return: $expect_out(0,string)" puts stdout "Failed login" send "\x1d\x0d" expect "telnet" send "close\r" send "quit\r" close } } incr n }

The easiest way is to use remsh command. It is an HP imlementation of BSD rsh. for IP in $IPS ;do remsh $IP -l $user "$1_command; $2command" >file done