PERL makes great golems.
A few years ago, I had call to automate some file transfers from one system to another. However, for security purposes, FTP was not an option. (It probably shouldn’t ever be on production systems–throw up a VM for that so when A Bad Thing happens, you can easily reconstitute that point of entry).It was at that point that I discovered the handy Tcl-based *nix utility expect.
expect is nothing more than a simple call/response program, but oh, the places you can go. For instance, here’s a simple script that grabs backup files from one server and transfers them to the backup_archives directory on the local server. This example uses password authentication, but if you use keys, just add the -i /path/to/key.pem line in the scp spawn command.
#!/usr/bin/expect -f
# catch the date passed on the command line and assign it to a variable
set thedate [lindex $argv 0]
# connect to remote server
spawn scp "user@server:/backups/*$thedate*" /backups_archives
#######################
expect {
-re ".*es.*o.*" {
exp_send "yes\r"
exp_continue
}
-re ".*sword.*" {
exp_send "your_passwordr\r"
}
}
interact
Read more about expect here: http://linux.die.net/man/1/expect
