Scripting issue: Reading a file from a remote server
 

I have an situation where I want to read a file into my script that lie on a remote server. I have ssh-keys set up just don't know how to do this.

Thanks if you respond.

Well, post what you've written so far, and we can help. Basic steps are:

• Connect to remote server
• Either copy the file to your system locally, or run a "cat" (or other), command to read the file into a variable on the fly.
• Process according to your wishes

There are MANY bash scripting tutorials you can find on Google, if you're just starting out.

I tried to ssh to the remote server and cat the file, but when i turned on the trace (set -x) it would sit at the $ prompt of the remote server and the rest of the script did not run.

Ok..again, post what you've written. And have you checked out the scripting tutorials???
http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/

Something to try is
Those are backticks, not single-quotes. That runs the command, and shoves it into a variable. So if you put "cat myfile.txt", you'll get the ouput of myfile.txt into that variable.

You can set up SMB shares and use "smbmount" to mount the share across the network. That would let you easily read a file on another server.

Or you can look into using the "rcp" command.

I had a project where I wanted to run the same script on multiple servers from a single point. This became a small application that I am not at liberty to share, but at the heart of it was the following command:

cat remote_script | sshpass -p`echo $PASSWORD` ssh root@$LIST bash

So remote_script would be the script I wanted to run. The catch 22 was the script had to use Java style carriage returns in the script and end with an exit command.

Example

The same code would instead look like

TB0ne's ssh string was what i was looking for. What had me hung up was that there's no colon after the ip address.

Thanks all.

I cannot do shares by the way they are forbidden for security.