The base issues are that we are moving to ssh from telnet, but not all at once and my boss refuses to make major changes. So, I've been tasked to implement expect like things without using expect. What I'm after is something like:

  send command
  read response
  send another command
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The devices being examined give different prompts or responses, depending on firmware or vendor. Therefore there are different follow-up commands. The following does work, but note the comments about

#!/opt/csw/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Net::SSH2;

my $host = "<host name or IP>"
my $user = "<user ID>";
my $pass = "<user password>";


my $ssh2 = Net::SSH2->new();
my $ok = 1;

print "==> $host\n";
$ssh2->connect($host) or $ok = 0;

if (!$ok) {
  print "Probable telnet\n";
  exit(1);
}

if (!$ssh2->auth_password ($user,$pass)) {
  print "==> 4 pass fail\n";
  exit(1);
}

my $chan2 = $ssh2->channel();
$chan2 -> shell();
# form some reason the order of the commands matters.
# change any one and the prints are blank
print $chan2 "dir\n";
sleep (1); # for some reason the sleep is needed to get output
print "LINE : $_" while <$chan2>;
print $chan2 "sh ver\n\n";
print "LINE : $_" while <$chan2>;
print $chan2 "sh clock\n\n";
print "LINE : $_" while <$chan2>;
print $chan2 "exit\n";

print "==> END\n"
[download]