Perl Scripts to manipulate Cisco gear

Has anyone written any Perl scripts to do menial cisco tasks, cl count, cl log, sh int | and the like? I d/l'd active state and have been slowly trudging through the learning mud, maybe I'll check amazon for books or something.

Any suggestions? I'm not the most patient and don't have much time due to my job's workload But I will devote what it takes if I can make my job easier/less time-consuming.

Thanks in advance for anything, even if it is a good kick in the pants motivator.

I've not done any scripts specifically for that but do have some check scripts that do things like check Windows services are running, drives can be mapped, nodes pinged and web pages are displaying particular lines of text. What exactly do you want to do? Presumably you'll open a telnet connection to the device then do some work with it. I'd write a mini-script first to debug the telnet part then progress from there

I've been working on some DOS scripts to open telnet sessions, can't find a way to get the logon info to populate. (Not very DOS fluent.) Everyone has been talking about Perl, so I thought I'd give it a try.

Thanks for the suggestions Bishop, I'm formerly UHSsncmrm but had some acc't/profile issues which wouldn't allow me to see forums after logging in. So, after many tries to fix the issue, I just created a new acc't.

Like I said, don't have a great deal of time so this process may drag on, please be patient.

Again, thanks.

Anyone looking for a scripting environment which is tightly integrated into Windows, .NET, Active Directory should definitely give Windows PowerShell a look. I have been playing with it for a couple of months and it is unbelievable. The only downside is that you can only use it on Windows XP, Vista and 2003.

What advantages does powershell give over the existing scripting facilites from the likes of perl etc? I'm not axe-grinding here, just curious and wanting to inform the debate. Tell us what you've discovered

Very interesting thread.

We spent a lot of time looking around for a scripting engine that would perform various tasks for our Cisco lab equipment and finally concluded to Linux's Expect Script (also offered for Windows), which is not the easiest to work with, but can get the job done if you have the patience to work with it.

You can check it out at expect.nist.gov/


Cheers,