To use it, you need to install Expect; not Perl's Expect.pm, but the TCL-centric language Expect that was originally from http://expect.nist.gov/. Be sure to install Shrubbery's patched Expect; otherwise you are likely to experience processes that hang once in a blue moon for no obvious reason. It will use the built in telnet and/or ssh commands on your system.

Clogin's configuration file is manna from heaven if your devices are the typical motley mix of different generations of equipment: some accepting telnet only, some accepting ssh only, some wanting user name and password, some wanting just the enable password twice, and some that want to autoenable (you get the # enable prompt as soon as you are logged in.)

If you just need to issue a single command, or a canned string of commands from the command line,

    clogin -c "show clock; show version" cisco2500a

is sufficient, once you have set up a ~/.cloginrc file to specify the characteristics of your routers. You can of course use open $fh, "clogin ...|" to read the output with a Perl script.

If you have to look at the output of some of the commands in order to decide what the next command should be, I think that using Perl's Expect.pm to spawn clogin is far less painless painful than anything else I've seen. You just let clogin do the tedious grunt work of getting logged in and getting an enable prompt, so you can concentrate on the task at hand. (Update: fixed "less painful". Thanks, rodion!)