Is there a way to automate serial port connection and collect output to a file from some commands?

[Ryan1]

Using a Linux bash script, is there a way to log into an Extreme switch through the com port, run a command and collect the output to a file where the bash script was executed from? I need to automate collecting some data from around 100 switches that are not connected to a network where I can use ssh. I need to access them physically using the serial console only.



Manually it would be something like:
screen /dev/ttyUSB0 9600
admin

show version
exit

where I would then dump the version information to a file.

[Erik_Auerswald]

Hi Ryan,

the non-ASCII characters are terminal control codes, used e.g. by the pager. If you are gathering output automatically, you should issue the command "disable clipaging" before your show commands.

Erik

[Ryan1]

Konstantin,

Thanks for the detailed response! This works to create a file, but the file also including what non-ascii characters like: [!p [?3;4l [4l > [?1049

I also added the command: show port 1-48 information detail | include "Port:|Link State"

This stops outputting at around 32 ports.

[Korsovsky__Kons]

Hi Ryan.
One of the simplest ways would be to utilize Linux "expect" scripts. There is a lot of information about how to use them available in the Internet but here is a quick example on how you can use it in your case:

Create a text file named script.sh with following contents:
#!/usr/bin/expect -f
spawn screen /dev/ttyUSB0 9600
expect "login:"
send "admin\r"
expect "password:"
send "\r"
expect " # "
send "show version\r"
expect " # "
send "exit\r"Change access permissions of this file:
# chmod 755 script.sh
Run it and send output to some text file:
# ./script.sh > file.txtI hope it will help.

--
Konstantin

[Gareth_Mitchell]

Ryan

I think in screen you can use -L as a CLI switch, this outputs to screenlog.x which you could then grep for version.

Inside screen you can also do CTRL a + H (without the +) to toggle output on/off

I don't know if you can specifically capture only the version output in screen.

HTH

-Gareth