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I know I'm reinventing a wheel here, but it took like five minutes, so who cares. Anyway, one thing that makes me bonkers about Apple Remote Desktop is that while I can run Unix commands on a remote machine with it, what I can't do is easily select a machine and just open an SSH session to it.

Well, now I can. Here's the script:

set theSSHList to {}
tell application "Remote Desktop"
     set theComputers to the selection
     repeat with x in theComputers
          set the end of theSSHList to Internet address of x
     end repeat
end tell

tell application "Terminal"
     repeat with x in theSSHList
          do script "ssh username@" & (contents of x)
     end repeat
end tell

It's pretty simple. We initialize theSSHList, then grab all the selected computers in Remote Desktop. (Note...if you have Apple Remote Desktop open, there is always a selected computer as long as there's a computer in the window to select, so this will tend not to fail unless you're pointing at an empty computer. For obvious reasons, it won't work on a computer you haven't added to Apple Remote Desktop yet.)

We process the list of computers, and dump their IP addresses into theSSHList.

Next is to interate through theSSHList, and open a new ssh session for each item in theSSHList.

This won't bring Terminal to the front, by the way. I don't tend to like that, but if you do, then just add an "activate" command right after "tell application "Terminal"" and Terminal will merrily pop to the front.

Put that in your scripts menu and you can now easily pop ssh windows to Apple Remote Desktop computers when you need.

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AppleScript, Stupid AppleScript Tricks, Apple Remote Desktop, Apple Remote Desktop Scripting

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