title: Spawning an interactive telnet session from a shell script
body: <p>I'm trying to write a script to allow me to log in to a console servers 48 ports so that I can quickly determine what devices are connected to each serial line.</p>
  
  <p>Essentially I want to be able to have a script that, given a list of hosts/ports, telnets to the first device in the list and leaves me in interactive mode so that I can log in and confirm the device, then when I close the telnet session, connects to the next session in the list.</p>
  
  <p>The problem I'm facing is that if I start a telnet session from within an executable bash script, the session terminates immediately, rather than waiting for input.</p>
  
  <p>For example, given the following code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$ cat ./telnetTest.sh
  #!/bin/bash
  
  while read line
  do
          telnet $line
  done
  $
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>When I run the command 'echo "hostname" | testscript.sh' I receive the following output:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$ echo "testhost" | ./telnetTest.sh
  Trying 192.168.1.1...
  Connected to testhost (192.168.1.1).
  Escape character is '^]'.
  Connection closed by foreign host.
  $
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Does anyone know of a way to stop the telnet session being closed automatically?</p>