This one time, at band camp, Sonia Hamilton wrote: >On Tue, 25 Sep 2007 11:25:44 +1000, "Robert Thorsby" ><[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: >> On 2007.09.25 11:07 Sonia Hamilton wrote: >> > I'm starting to learn expect [1][2] to help me >> > automate some programs that prompt for input. >> > Expect dates from the early 90s - is it the >> > right way to go or is there now a better shinier >> > tool/language that I should be learning? >> >> I prefer to use one of the *dialog utilities (ie, dialog, kdialog, >> gdialog, or -- my dialog-du-jour -- Xdialog) in a shell script and >> validate the user input in the script. It looks a helluva lot better >> than expect via a command line. It's prolly also more versatile. > >Not sure how *dialogs would help :-) > >I want to (as a simple example) update my password on n *nix machines >using the passwd command, which prompts me to enter my old password then >new password twice. With expect I can automatically feed in the old and >new passwords when prompted as passwd is run via ssh on each of the n >machines.
So for example you could use clusterssh or distributed ssh; dsh or cssh packages in Debian, for example, which are quite sweet for doing the same interactive thing on a bunch of machines (with the caveat that if your machines have varying latencies then you might have to wait a long time between commands to get them all in sync). Alternatively, run passwd on one box and then use perl or sed to replace the password hash in place on /etc/shadow like you said ;-) You can probably make a one-liner that does this nicely :) -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
