# Net/ssh question

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/net-ssh-question/84655>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [December 31, 2005, 12:06pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/net-ssh-question/84655 "2005-12-31T12:06:02Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/u/4bbf92/32.png) [@unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/unknown)\
**Post date:** [December 31, 2005, 12:06pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/net-ssh-question/84655/1 "2005-12-31T12:06:02Z")

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Those are my very first steps in Ruby. I wrote a small ruby program  
which sends messages to client desktops in the same local network.  
Basically, I ssh to each machine and execute a call to zenity to bring  
up a GTK dialog with a custom message. Everything works fine, which was  
unexpected by itself :-). The important piece of code here is:

Net::SSH.start( host,‘root’,rootpwd ) do |session|  
session.open\_channel do |channel|  
channel.on\_success do  
#some unimportant things here  
channel.send\_data “zenity --title ‘IMPORTANT’ --info  
–text ‘#{msg}’ &\n”  
channel.close  
end  
channel.send\_request “shell”, nil, true  
end  
session.loop  
end

Now, to the question. By default some zenity options allow user input  
which is directly sent to stdout. E.g. (directly copied from man page)

- zenity --title “Select Host” --entry --text “Select the host you  
would like to flood-ping”

How can I capture the user input in this case? I tried unsuccessfully  
to find something in the net/ssh documentation but I am lost in the  
rdoc.

And one more question. As you noticed I run zenity in the background.  
This is because if the user does not respod to the message (clicks OL,  
etc…) zenity (and the ruby scirpt) just hangs and waits. Can I set a  
timeout from within Ruby and close the channel after the timeout  
expires? Of course I can always do it in bash:

expect -c "set timeout 30; eval spawn -noecho zenity … ; expect

but I would really prefer to do it from Ruby. In this way I can  
distinguish a real timeout from a user action which did not result in  
anything sent to stdout.

Thanks in advance.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/u/4bbf92/32.png) [@unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/unknown)\
**Post date:** [December 31, 2005, 12:24pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/net-ssh-question/84655/2 "2005-12-31T12:24:14Z")

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I solved my problems. I hadn’t paid attention to the  
Net::SSH::Service::Shell module which allows me to do almost exactly  
what I want. I still need to distinguish a timeout from a user action  
which did not result in anything sent to stdout. Maybe I’ll just use  
the SyncShell service, encapsulate a shell in a thread and have another  
thread watch what’s going on with the first one. But I don’t know if  
this can be done in ruby.