Hi There,

Trying work out best method to call a remote program to run via a command line. This is using Solaris 2.8.

I am wanting to be able to call a program running on another Solaris machine and wait until completion before returning control. Also wanting to be able to retrieve an error code if program fails.

Anyone know the best method to do this? Thanks.

Have you looked at Expect?   It's an extension to Tcl and Tcl/Tk and it gives you extra commands:

spawn - to start anothe process
send - so send input to that other process
expect - to retreive the response

Typically you would spawn an ssh or telnet session and then use send and expect to control your inputs and outputs.   There's some talk our Tcl board about expect on thsi forum, and lots of other links to resources at http://www.wellho.net/resources/tcl.html

Alternatives ... if you know some Perl, it too has an Expect interface and there's also a module called Net::telnet that will let you run a remote telnet session.   And if the remote Solaris box is running a web server, you could web enable the program on that remote machine and then contact it through the interface provide using REST or SOAP techniques, an RSS feed, or something like Perl's LWP package or directly contacting the URL if you're writing PHP.

Thanks, I'll look into this. I was hoping to get away with just using SSH but not sure that it has the error handling or wait capability.

Cheers,
Dean.

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