Hello guys,

I have a shell script that's really simple and nothing dynamic: it only connects to a telnet session, executes cmd 1, waits x seconds, cmd 2, x seconds, etc...

Now, I want to do something like this: whenever I connect via telnet and execute the command, if I have certain output, I want to send an e-mail. But it's important to notice that I don't want to receive email if I have output "X", and 60 seconds after (for example) if I run the same script and have the same output also receive the e-mail... What do you think is the best approach to this problem ?
It's difficult?

Regards,
André

Test lock file existence / epoch time stamp contents?

The expect command would be useful. It could run the telnet session and analyse it's output. When expect identifies an output that you want to trigger an email it could either run a program that sends the email or send output down a pipeline to a program that sends the emails.

The program that sends the emails needs to remember when it last sent an email corresponding to each output. Depending on how frequent the outputs are and how often the system is re-initialised the remembering could be either within the program or in a database. For ease, the per-output timestamps would be in seconds since the epoch began.

Again depending on how frequent the outputs are, and on available programming skills, the program could be in awk, shell script, perl, python, ruby etc.