Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello all,
probably this is a very stupid question but I'm a beginner in the arts of scripting...

I'm trying to do a script that logs in to several equipments, switchs etc, and make them show their version and save all the output to a file.
I managed to do the login, username/password and typing the command but the problem is that the command only displays a variable number of lines and then waits for a key press to continue showing the infos, thats the hard part I can't get it to work.....
The number of lines usable depends on the window size and the server I'm using. I don't have a fixed number for each server.

It looks like this :
(sleep 1;
echo username;
sleep 1;
echo password;
sleep 1
echo "show version"
sleep 3;
echo "exit") | telnet server

Any idea how to solve this?
Thanks a lot for the help!!!

If SNMP is configured on those witches use SNMP

Thanks, but not all the switches/servers have SNMP....
I have to do it via a script running in Linux.

Thanks!

There is a "dirty" tool available called "rancid", which allows you to get information from all kind of network equipment.

It's build in perl and expect scripts.

Probably there are more similar tools around.

if you have Perl, the above can be done using its telnet module too, with more control over what you want to do.
Please see here for an example

I agree that you should use some kind of available tool for this. Programming this effectively would take some time - unless you don't have a deadline. Lots of windows or GUI based tools won't come for free though.

Rancid is for free