Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Cyph0n 1087 days ago
+1 to textfsm: it is an extremely powerful approach to reliably parse CLI-based outputs. I used to do some IOS-XR device automation when I worked at Cisco - mainly for integration testing - and I (and other teams) used it heavily.

This ties in to your point about how you often need to fallback to SSH or Telnet. For example, a lot of platform-specific data isn’t exposed through standard interfaces, but almost everything is available through a CLI. There are also times when you have no choice but to use the CLI - for example, when re-imaging or reloading a device.