How to Script Multiple Ssh and Scp Commands to Various Systems

How to script multiple ssh and scp commands to various systems

You can simplify this process a lot by tunneling ssh connections over other ssh connections (see this previous answer). The way I'd do it is to create an .ssh/config file on the LOCAL system with the following entries:

Host SYSTEM3
        ProxyCommand    ssh -e none SYSTEM2 exec /usr/bin/nc %h %p 2>/dev/null
        HostName        SYSTEM3.full.domain
        User            system3user

Host SYSTEM2
        ProxyCommand    ssh -e none SYSTEM1 exec /usr/bin/nc %h %p 2>/dev/null
        HostName        SYSTEM2.full.domain
        User            system2user

Host SYSTEM1
        HostName        SYSTEM1.full.domain
        User            system1user

(That's assuming both intermediate hosts have netcat installed as /usr/bin/nc -- if not, you may have to find/install some equivalent way of gatewaying stdin&stdout into a TCP session.)

With this set up, you can use scp SYSTEM3:/data /data on LOCAL, and it'll automatically tunnel through SYSTEM1 and SYSTEM2 (and ask for the passwords for the three SYSTEMn's in order -- this can be a little confusing, especially if you mistype one).

What is the cleanest way to ssh and run multiple commands in Bash?

How about a Bash Here Document:

ssh otherhost << EOF
  ls some_folder; 
  ./someaction.sh 'some params'
  pwd
  ./some_other_action 'other params'
EOF

To avoid the problems mentioned by @Globalz in the comments, you may be able to (depending what you're doing on the remote site) get away with replacing the first line with

ssh otherhost /bin/bash << EOF

Note that you can do variable substitution in the Here document, but you may have to deal with quoting issues. For instance, if you quote the "limit string" (ie. EOF in the above), then you can't do variable substitutions. But without quoting the limit string, variables are substituted. For example, if you have defined $NAME above in your shell script, you could do

ssh otherhost /bin/bash << EOF
touch "/tmp/${NAME}"
EOF

and it would create a file on the destination otherhost with the name of whatever you'd assigned to $NAME. Other rules about shell script quoting also apply, but are too complicated to go into here.

Automate SCP with multiple files with expect script

I found what I wanted with much more googleing. Thankyou for your help, hope this helps others

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1/scp-with-wildcard-in-expect-834813/

#!/usr/bin/expect -f

spawn bash -c "scp /path/* root@IP:/tmp/"
expect {
  -re ".*es.*o.*" {
    exp_send "yes\r"
    exp_continue
  }
  -re ".*sword.*" {
    exp_send "Password\r"
  }
}
interact

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