Automating telnet login and commands on a Mac

Question

Currently I do something like this:

telnet 192.168.0.3 23

username

password

cd /dir/

programname -s -g dosomething

I want to do this with one step, the coolest would be to compile a program for this using Automator, but i have no idea how to do that.
"shell script" in Automator fails at telnet 192.168.0.3 23 saying "connection refused" of course: I had no chance to type in password and so on.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

When ssh isn't available, expect is typically used to automate access using telnet.

From the linked article:

#!/usr/bin/expect #Where the script should be run from.
set timeout 20 #If it all goes pear shaped the script will timeout after 20 seconds.
set name [lindex $argv 0] #First argument is assigned to the variable name
set user [lindex $argv 1] #Second argument is assigned to the variable user
set password [lindex $argv 2] #Third argument is assigned to the variable password
spawn telnet $name #This spawns the telnet program and connects it to the variable name
expect "login:" #The script expects login
send "$user " #The script sends the user variable
expect "Password:" #The script expects Password
send "$password " #The script sends the password variable
interact #This hands control of the keyboard over two you (Nice expect feature!)

Answer 2

Then, if no sshd is installed, you could automate your telnet using expect, that you probably will have to install on your mac.

Expect is a tool primarily for automating interactive applications, such as telnet, ftp, passwd, fsck, rlogin, tip, and more. Expect really makes this stuff trivial. Expect is also useful for testing these applications. It is described in many books, articles, papers, and FAQs. There is an entire book on it available from O'Reilly.

See http://www.nist.gov/el/msid/expect.cfm .

Answer 3

If the system running on 192.168.0.3 has a sshd server running, then you could simply do

ssh username@192.168.0.3 'cd /dir/ ; programmname -s -g dosomething'

To check if you have sshd running on 192.168.0.3 you could either just try it, or login using telnet as you do already and, if it's a unix/linux/maxosx try doing a

pgrep -fl sshd

or

ps -e | grep sshd

or

lsof -i :22

All of these above will either not find anything or give you a line showing that sshd is running.