Question

I’m trying to automate a startup of a specific service with bash

When the service is started with init.d (/etc/init.d/openvpn.custom) it is promting for username and then password – and then it connects

The auth-user-pass from-file is not possible with the installed version, and it cannot be upgraded because of dependencies

So i’m trying to write a simple bash scripts that executes the init.d script, sleeps for a bit, inputs the username, returns, sleeping a bit, inputting the password – you’ll get the flow.

like http://pastebin.com/qWHX7Di5

I’ve experimented with echo, but it doesent seem to work

This is for a rather legacy firewall i’m asked to keep connected.

Is this even possible?

Answer 1

I would use expect instead of bash. You can still call it from within bash if you need to do other tasks as well.

In expect, the script would be something like the following (untested):

#!/usr/bin/expect -f
set username "username"
set password "password"

spawn /etc/init.d/openvpn.custom start
expect "Username:"
send "$username\r"
expect "Password:"
send "$password\r"
expect eof

You’d want to change the expect "Username:" & expect "Password:" lines to match the actual login prompts that are output by your init.d script.

See the expect man page for further details.