Bronston has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Got another question. I need to tell a program called brutefir what to do with perl on the same system. I've been reading http://perldoc.perl.org/perlipc.html and frankly I don't get it. Can someone give me a sort of basic example that applies specifically to brutefir. Brutefir docs say it will accept cli through telnet, a local socket, a pipe, or a serial line. I'm assuming a pipe is the ideal why to communicate with it but please correct me if I'm wrong. I don't know much about pipes. The simplest command to test with is abort I'd say because it kills the program, pretty easy to see. I don't think I will need to return any data from brutefir but if it's simple enough I'm sure it might come in handy. Thanks in advance, Bronston

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Re: Help with perl to cli pipe
by kschwab (Vicar) on Nov 19, 2013 at 02:57 UTC

    If you are most interested in getting it up and running quickly, without having to think much about the underlying details, telnet is probably the easiest route.

    I say that largely because of the Net::Telnet module. It understands the idea of a CLI, setting the expected prompt character (appears to be "> " in BruteFir), etc.

    Other than looking at BruteFir's docs for a few minutes, I don't have any experience with it. That said, this short example "should work", unless I missed something important.

    my $host="hostname.whatever.com";
use Net::Telnet ();
$t = new Net::Telnet (Timeout => 10,
                      Port => 3000,
                      Prompt => '/> $/');
$t->open($host);
@helptext = $t->cmd("help");
print @helptext;

    [download]

    One caveat...I did find it a bit odd that the CLI configuration allowed you to configure a listen port, but not which ip addresses to listen on, so you can't restrict it to just localhost. I didn't see support for a password either. So it appears that once you turn it on, anyone can connect to it. You might want to use iptables to restrict access if you go this route.

[reply]
[d/l]
      Shoot I forgot to mention I can't install modules on this system.
[reply]
        If you can create a file, you can install a module locally, in your home directory.
[reply]

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