I'm sorry, but I just cannot understand what you wish to accomplish. I cannot tell whether you refer to
- Terminal
a generic name for a number of different applications (x-terminal-emulator, xterm, xfce4-terminal, etc.) that all provide a command-line terminal in most Linux distributions) - Terminal control
via termios interfaces - Terminal libraries
or text-based user interfaces like curses - Creating pseudoterminals
like e.g. screen and expect commands do: they create a pseudo-terminal, and run some other program in that pseudo-terminal. The other program thinks it's being run by the user in a terminal, but both input and output is under full control of your own program. - Connecting to localhost or remote machines via SSH programmatically
so that your own program or script is a stand-in for the user supplying the keypresses to the remote machine
- Via the ssh command-line client (external program)
- Via an ssh library
- Via writing your own ssh client
My instincts do say that your root problem is related to how SSH requires a password. Using a program or a script (or expect) to supply that password is always the wrong path: you should use public keys instead! See here, here, here, or here for guides. If your server does not allow public key authentication, switch to a better server, or complain to your server administrator's boss. If you need noninteractive SSH connections, public keys, fully certificate-based authentication (which is a bit more complicated to set up), and certain even more complex schemes involving Kerberos etc., are the only sane options.
Some recommended reading:
- Pseudoterminals(Wikipedia)
- man 7 pty, Linux pseudoterminal interfaces
- man 1 ssh, the man page of the OpenSSH command-line client (if you want to just have your own program or script replace the user)
- libssh tutorial; in case you want to create your own SSH client
Although all of this looks daunting, it really is not. The above is so massive only because you have a LOT of options to choose from.
In my case, I do a lot of stuff remotely via scripts and commands (having set up SSH keys first). For example, to create a compressed tar ball of /var/www/ on the remote computer, and store the result locally, I can run
Code:
ssh remote.machine tar -cJOC /var/www/ . > remote-www.tar.xz
Or, if the connection is fast and I wish to only gather but not compress the files on that remote machine, I can use
Code:
ssh remote.machine tar -cOC /var/www/ . | xz -z -F xz - > remote-www.tar.xz
Or, if I just want the file listing in a shell variable, I can use
Code:
WWWFILES="$(ssh remote.machine find /var/www -ls)"
Or, if the server has ample CPU power, but the connection is slow, I can save bandwidth by compressing the list on the remote machine and decompress on the local machine using
Code:
WWWFILES="$(ssh remote.machine 'find /var/www -ls | xz -z -F xz -' | xz -d -F xz -)"
If you have a specific task, and preferred language (shell script, Python, C), I should be able to help you choose a straightforward way to solve your actual problem?