I/O Redirection and Telnet

[Thomas D. Schardt]

I've written several shell scripts that take command line arguments and
build a sequence of FTP commands to transfer files between systems
(Unix to Unix, Unix to VM, and VM to Unix).  Standard UNIX I/O
redirection is used to pass the command stream to FTP.  FTP does it's
thing without the user having to interact directly with it.

I've tried to use the same trick with TELNET to black box some remote
command execution on an IBM VM system, but TELNET doesn't appear to be
cooperating.  Once TELNET gets invoked, it sits there and waits for
keyboard input, apparently forgetting that it's standard input is now
coming from somewhere else.  I've tried all the standard (and a few
non-standard) I/O redirection tricks but nothing seems to work.  I've
tried this on an IRIS 4D/60T Workstation (Sys V), an Apollo DN3000
(BSD4.2), and a Sun Workstation (BSD4.3). Silicon Graphics Hotline
people tell me that this works with release 3.0 of their OS, but that
doesn't explain why it fails on the other machines.

Anybody got any ideas, comments, or preferably solutions???

Bruce Pfaff
Tom ("he's using my id") Schardt
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
BITNET:   K4TDS at SCFVM
ARPANET:  K4TDS at SCFVM.BITNET