�

Using perl to connect to remote hosts via telnet

Did you think it was easy?

Suppose you needed to open a connection to a remote host from within your perl program. One thing you would probably think of doing at first is the following:

open TELNET "|telnet $hostname";
print TELNET "$username\n";
print TELNET "$password\n";
...

Unfortunately, if you try this, you'll find it doesn't work. The telnet program connects to the remote host but it completely ignores any commands you pipe to it. That's because the telnet program reads its input only from the terminal and not from standard input.

The most cunning among you might then think a workaround for this: Open a socket to port 23 (the default telnet port) of the remote machine and write directly to it, thus, bypassing the telnet program altogether. Well, although that might sound like a neat idea, it's not. And that's because the telnet protocol requires that certain control data be exchanged between the two machines by sending them along through the same socket connection.

So, it turns out that the problem is much more complicated than it seemed at first. We don't just need to write code to perform socket I/O, but also we need to write code that speaks the TELNET protocol. This is the bad news. The good news is that this code has already been written, and that its author was kind enough to bundle it in a useful module, Net::Telnet, available at CPAN.

Net::Telnet

Using Net::Telnet is pretty straightforward and simple. Let's first see a no-thrills example:

use Net::Telnet;
$telnet = new Net::Telnet ( Timeout=>10,
Errmode=>'die');
$telnet->open('camel.perlfect.com');
$telnet->waitfor('/login: $/i');
$telnet->print('bilbo');
$telnet->waitfor('/password: $/i');
$telnet->print('baggins');
$telnet->waitfor('/\$ $/i');
$telnet->print('who');
$output = $telnet->waitfor('/\$ $/i');
print $output;

This simple program connects to camel.perlfect.com with username and password, 'bilbo' and 'baggins' respectively, and the issues the command 'who' to get a list of logged in users. It then retrieves and prints the output. Although the code is self explanatory, here are a few things worth of noting:

The Errmode option in the constructor for the telnet object specifies what kind of behaviour we want the object to have when it encounters an error. die means that the program will die with an error message. The other option is return. This will cause the method that caused the error to return a false value. The error message can then be retrieved from Net::Telnet->errmsg.
The method waitfor() takes a regular expression as an argument and tries to match it in the stream that is transmitted from the remote host. Upon a successful match, the method returns all input before the match.

Shortcuts

You might notice that issuing commands involves repeating print() and waitfor() calls in a very much similar manner. We print a command and then we try to match a shell prompt. Net::Telnet provides a very nice mode of operation that rids you of some of the repetitive tt. All you need to do is to specify the regular expression that matches a prompt as a parameter in the object's constructor and then use the cmd() method to issue commands. Similarly to command issuing, Net::Telnet provides a handy method to simplify the login process, namely login(). The following example demonstrates these shortcuts.

use Net::Telnet;
$telnet = new Net::Telnet ( Timeout=>10,
Errmode=>'die'
Prompt => '/\$ $/i');
$telnet->open('camel.perlfect.com');
$telnet->login('bilbo', 'baggins');
print $telnet->cmd('who');

This does the same as the previous example, but with much less typing. Note that the login() method matches the login and password prompts with the regular expressions /(login|username)[: ]*$/i and /password[: ]*$/i respectively.

So far we have covered the basics of the Net::Telnet module, enough to get you going with your first telnetting scripts. The module is rich with other features, so make sure you take the time to have a look at the documentation.

Happy TELNETing!

Online Documentation/Tutorials

The Net::Telnet documentation that comes with its distribution (Net::Telnet comes as part of the libnet bundle at CPAN) covers just about anything you would need to know about

�

Save This Page

�

Comments

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Like it? Share it!

�

Post to
del.icio.us

�

[an error occurred while processing this directive]