Pi telnetting into router to get stats

[Galaxynik]

Hi Folks - my summer project

I have a pi which happily runs an early version of Squeezeplugrpi (based on debian squeeze i think) currently its working wel as a nas and dlna server, its also collecting data from my currentcost electricity monitor and storing the data in RR database (perl), I have scripts executing regularly to create graphs (bash) and a webserver which allows me to view the data across the web ... phew.

What I want to do now is telnet every couple of mins into my router (technicolour 582n), login and run the following commands
'telnet 192.186.3.253'
'Administrator'
'Password'
'xdsl info expand=enabled'

get the output into a variable then ..

'exit'

then parse the data in the variable I want, store it in another RR database - I can then sort out graphing and making available to the webserver
what I am struggling with is the bold section above

any ideas - basically trying to have a routerstats like output without running a energy guzzling windows machine running Oh and the Pi is running headless so I need to set it all up using putty and ssh'ing to the pi

[RaTTuS]

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7013 ... sh-scripts
see expect scripts

[Galaxynik]

Thanks I had a look at 'EXPECT' but while looking at it I found a telnet module for perl and since I was going to use perl for the rest of it I thought I'd give that a go amd managed to make some progress. Just now need to get better at PERL