Hi perl Monks,

Unfortunately we all don't have the privilege of working on linux or solaris all the time but still love to use perl to do everything! personally I hate powershell especially when window$ people tell me to use it instead of perl, vbscript is cumbersome, and batch files just plain suck most of the time because they aren't very extendable, robust or creative. There's a lot of published powershell scripts on this topic which read from a csv file that has hostnames and user id / passwords, which I could easily build into this, but just wanted to get something out there because a google search on "perl windows reboot" script returns nothing...

I wrote a quick and dirty reboot script, planning to expand it a bit more to parse log files, make net service calls, ping ip address to confirm each server is up before moving to the next depending on the underlying software dependencies which created the need for this in the first place, but trying to build in some basic error handling, which will help me expand this further. On my first go, I received a hickup from one of the servers complaining about:

The handle is invalid.
Error communicating with PsExec service on Blah.Blah.Blah

[download]
When I logged onto the server I saw a whole bunch of dll errors, which usually happens after windows patches have been deployed but the server wasn't rebooted, so therefore psexec call didn't work...

I want to be able to process this output and if I don't get the response: 

cmd started on Blah.Blah.Blah with process ID 4428.

[download]


then I want to terminate the program. I'm calling the command with a 
print for qx|$externalExe 2>&1|;

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How do I process this output within the perl script to exit gracefully (or try alternative methods) when an error is encountered? Perhaps I'm not totally understanding this 2>&1 part of my qx, can I read this output within the script?
Thanks!

Sample Code: 
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my @servers = qw(
    Blah.Blah.Blah 
    Blah1.Blah.Blah 
    Blah2.Blah.Blah
    Blah3.Blah.Blah
    Blah4.Blah.Blah
);

foreach (@servers){

my $externalExe = qq(psexec.exe \\\\$_ );
$externalExe .= q(-u BLAH\foo -p secret -i -d cmd /c shutdown /r /f /t
+ 0);

print "\n\nStarting external program...\n";

print for qx|$externalExe 2>&1|; # Executes the program, and prints it
+'s output 

print "Program $externalExe run completed.\n";
sleep 360;

}

[download]
- 3dbc

In reply to SEQUENTIAL REBOOT ORDER WINDOW$ by 3dbc

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