expect works really well if you are used to TCL/c-shell type logic. If you
are more of a ksh person, or already know perl you will probably prefer the
perl version. It works well if you are running it from AIX or Solaris. HP/UX
handles tty's in a strange fashion, and perl expect does not work there. If
you are an HP/UX shop there is perl Net::Telnet. It runs on the three
platforms I have tested, but as the name implies, you are opening a new
telnet session under your current process, so you need to provide logon
credentials as well as the TSM credentials. Once you are connected though,
it is very powerful.

My personal preference is to run everything from an AIX base, and if I need
to do something on an HP box I use perl expect to control /usr/bin/telnet to
the HP box. <grin> If you decide to use the perl expect you might want to
borrow a copy of the O'Rielly Expect book (sorry, I can't remember the name)
to read once for concepts. The perl version works well, but is not as
thoroughly documented.

Kai

On Mon, 18 Feb 2002 12:29:33 -0800, Alex Paschal
<AlexPaschal AT FREIGHTLINER DOT COM> wrote:
>
>If you like, you can use something like "expect" to script your dsmadmc
>commands.  For applications that block regular STDIN piping and
redirecting,
>like telnet or dsmadmc, "expect" does the magic tty swapping that's
>necessary to feed the password into the password prompt so it won't show in

>the ps.  I don't know much more about it because it's a little higher
>powered programming than I've done in years, but if the security is that
>important to you, it might be worth your time.  Here's the web site.
>
>http://expect.nist.gov/
>
>There's also a Perl version, but I don't know how good it's cross-platform
>functionality is.
>
>http://search.cpan.org/search?dist=Expect
>