Question

I’m writing a program where I need to telnet into a remote machine, access a file and edit it.
I am able to do the telnet part.
This gives me access to the OutputStream and InputStream of that system. I can send commands and open up the file using a vi editor. I am also able to read the contents of the file

DataInputStream data = new DataInputStream(telnet.getInputStream());
data.readLine().

But I am unable to write to this file or edit it.
Any suggestions?

Answer 1

I suspect that you are running into line-editing issues on the remote system. I think that using sed (as @Jim Garrison mentioned) or using the ed editor which is line based would work instead of the key based editor like vi or emacs.

Here’s a quick example of how to use ed to edit the file named “file”. man ed should show the various features.

> ed file
file: No such file or directory
i
hello there
.
1
hello there
a
and now append a line
.
1,$n
1       hello there
2       and now append a line
w
34
q

> cat file
hello there
and now append a line