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

I want to write a perl script that can send commands into an identified active terminal window (i.e. i can work out the PID and the path to pty) on a Solaris unix server, and have those commands run (only on a terminal owned by the executor of the perl code).

I have searched CPAN and here (and all over the web) and found no clues how it might be done.

Any clues?

Thanks

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Re: Controlling a terminal
by LAI (Hermit) on Jan 21, 2003 at 15:05 UTC

    Hm... I seem to remember being able to do something along the lines of 

    # echo "remember, root is watching you" > /dev/ptye4

    [download]

    (and, incidentally, cat /dev/ptye4), but I think you have to be root either way, and I don't remember it actually executing anything. What you're trying to do is have an external program (tcsh, or whatever your shell is) interpret some commands, and I don't think many shells will like that.

    What is it you're trying to do? Perhaps there's some other way you can accomplish whatever it is.


    LAI
    :eof
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      You remember right, but this only echo's text to the users terminal rather than run any commands within the terminal for the user.

      Essentially I am trying to write a GUI cluster admin tool, whereby text typed into a console is multiplied out to 2 or more terminal windows (and where each window can be typed in individually) to minimise cluster admin headaches.

      I have the basic perl outline in my head and the GUI side of it written - i just do not currently know how to control a terminal window in this way.

      We have an off-the-shelf tool already but it doesnt support ssh, and it lacks a few "niceties", hence this mini-project.

[reply]

        So you want to run the same command simultaneously on several cluster nodes. Again, I think it would be too much of a headache to open n terminals and tell them all to pass stuff to shells. You would probably be better off using something like Net::SSH and just maintaining one session per node. Maintain an array of references to connections or something like that, and everytime you type a command into your GUI you iterate across the array and pass the command to each connection.


        LAI
        :eof
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