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

Hello monks. I am a perl newbie, and I have a question: What module and what format will allow me to execute commands remotely through perl. I have many machines that I would like to be able to have run a batch file just as if I were actually in front of that machine typing at a command prompt. Any ideas? Follow up - Any idea how I could get current drive mappings for remote machines? I'd like to know exactly which servers and machines each of the target machines is mapped to at a given moment. Any help is greatly appreciated.

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Re: Run a program remotely
by phydeauxarff (Priest) on Mar 06, 2003 at 22:57 UTC
    if the target is a Unix box, you could use Net::Telnet

    We used this as the basis for remotely provisioning and controlling about 4000 Netscreen appliances before Net::Telnet::Netscreen came out.

    It's pretty easy to use as you can see from the example provided.
    use Net::Telnet ();
    $t = new Net::Telnet (Timeout => 10,
                          Prompt => '/bash\$ $/');
    $t->open("sparky");
    $t->login($username, $passwd);
    @lines = $t->cmd("who");
    print @lines;

    You might have to make some adjustments for the prompt returned, but the documention provides examples for this as well.
    Of course, if you aren't connecting to something that will accept a Telnet session, such as a winblows box....all bets are off for this example.
[reply]
Re: Run a program remotely
by pg (Canon) on Mar 06, 2003 at 22:49 UTC
[reply]
Re: Run a program remotely
by zentara (Cardinal) on Mar 07, 2003 at 13:16 UTC
    If you are going to be doing things on a remote machine, you may as well start out right, and use ssh instead of telnet. Why use telnet, and show your password to the world? 
    #!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Net::SSH::Perl;

my %hostdata    = (
        'localhost' => {
                           user  => "zz",
                       password  => "ztest",
                       cmdtorun  => "ls -la",
                      misc_data  => [],
        },


   'zentara.zentara.net' => {
                               user  => "zz",
                           password  => "ztest",
                           cmdtorun  => "/usr/bin/uptime",
                          misc_data  => [],
        },


);

foreach my $host (keys %hostdata) {
    my $ssh = Net::SSH::Perl->new($host, port => 22);   #, debug => 1 
+);
    $ssh->login($hostdata{$host}{user},$hostdata{$host}{password} );

    my ($out) = $ssh->cmd($hostdata{$host}{cmdtorun});
    print "$out\n";
}

    [download]
[reply]
[d/l]
      Thank you for your advice, I will start playing around with this stuff today. thank you.
[reply]

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