How can I send an F5 thru a telnet session?

[Ken261]

I have to logon to a remote machine with a telnet session. To do this manually, I have to hit F5 to bring up the login prompt after the telnet session is established. I can establish the connection with LabVIEW, but how can I send the F5?

[BrianP]

Telnet is essentially an ASCII-only protocol. There's no "F5" in ASCII, so you're probably supposed to send some sequence of ASCII codes to make it work.

Typically, text-based telnet programs emulate various kinds of physical terminals, such as DEC's warhorse "vt52" and "vt100" terminals, or the old ADM-3A. Those terminals sometimes had special keys that could send a sequence of commands. For example, I think the vt100 had an "F5" key that sent Escape (a byte containing decimal 27) followed by the letters "Ot". (I am looking at a UNIX box with an /etc/termcap entry for a vt100, and interpreting what it says. I'm not an expert at UNIX /etc/termcap entries, so I may be misreading it.)

Anyway, you need to find out what kind of terminal this remote machine
is expecting you to use. This will tell you what string to send for an F5 key.

I hope this helps.