Hi guys!

I need some help with an extrange problem. I´m trying to write an script that manage telnet connections to some networking devices, working in background and monitorizing some networks parameters. I can connect and perform some tasks in these machines but I have a problem I can´t solve.

One of the 'security' modules is designed to avoid a second telnet session can be opened in a device wich has a session opened, because this means my script is hanged trying to connect. To do it, I check in the process list to look for this kind of connection. Since all the connections should be done from the linux server, if I can kill the process in this machine , there shouldn't be any problem.

I have a problem I hope u can help me with.

When I find a session opened before the connection the script have to do, and try to kill this process, the script dies itself also. Here is the code,

idcon=$(ps -ef | grep $eq | grep -v 'grep' | grep -v 'ping' | cut -f2 )

if [ -n $idcon ] 2>/dev/null
then
echo "No se han detectado consolas abiertas"
else
echo "Cerrando consola abierta en" $eq
kill -9 $idcon 2>/dev/null
fi
exit 0

I have tried all the signals but nothing works. The worst part s that I have seen codes likes this in some pages that seems to work perfectly, so if anybody has an idea....

Do you have something like this:
in your code somewhere? That might be the problem. Also, can you give examples for $eq and a line output from ps -ef that it should match? This information is necessary to further inspect the problem. Also, what is the filename of the script?

Greetings,
Benjamin

First of all, thanks for this quick help.

I have no idea about the meaning of this line 'set -e' and it´s not included in the code. I´m going to try it.

Anyway, the $eq variable means the destination ip formatted as "10.1.X.X".

The output line from the ps is somthing like this 'root 25306 23477 0 10:37 pts/2 00:00:00 telnet 10.1.6.5 40000'. I filter it looking for this ip, avoiding the lines that has the words grep or ping (the script has to try connectivity before making the connections)

The script name is vguard.sh

I hope u can give some info to solve the problem.

Thank you very much!

Jaime.

Okay, I think I got your problem. Try modifying the line like this:
What happened? The 'cut' command expects tab characters for column separation by default. In your example that somehow returned the whole line. The kill command then looked like this:
In this case, kill tried to kill the following processes: 25306, 23477, 0, 40000. The 23477 is the PARENT process of the telnet process: your script.
Or in other words: all parameters were checked, and if they were integer numbers, the process will be killed. Had you not used 2>/dev/null you would have seen error messages about the remaining parameters.
With the new code I sent you above the output from ps is changed to turn tabs into spaces, consecutives spaces into one space and then cut is instructed to use a single space as column separator. This then returns only the second column, the process id you want.

set -e means: stop this script if any command returns non-zero status, ie: fails.
Another command you might be interested in: set -x
This means that each command is printed to stderr before it is executed. This can help a lot with debugging.

HTH,
Benjamin

Ben, thank you very much. I have finally solve the problem, It´s due to what you have said.

I can continue with my script on my own.

Thanks,

Jaime.