Batching Commands

The simplest scripting mechanism is to batch appliance shell commands. For example, to automatically take a snapshot called "newsnap" in the project "myproj" and the filesystem "myfs", put the following commands in a file:

shares
select myproj
select myfs
snapshots snapshot newsnap

Then ssh onto the appliance, redirecting standard input to be the file:

% ssh root@dory < myfile.txt

In many shells, you can abbreviate this by using a "here file", where input up to a token is sent to standard input. Following is the above example in terms of a here file:

% '''ssh root@dory << EOF
shares
select myproj
select myfs
snapshots snapshot newsnap
EOF'''

This mechanism is sufficient for the simplest kind of automation, and may be sufficient if wrapped in programmatic logic in a higher-level shell scripting language on a client, but it generally leaves much to be desired.