dhog@plan9.bell-labs.com says:

> I'm personally getting quite sick of typing "atdt<number>^M", (and
> sometimes getting it wrong) and then having to participate in
> further handshaking (and sometimes head-scratching) with my
> ISP.  Has anyone given any thought as to how this should be
> automated?

The "atdt<number>^M" part can be automated by using -p telco!ispname
if you trust telco (and if your /lib/ndb/local has a line like
sys=ispname telco=555-1234).

The further handshaking (if you need a login script for an isp
which doesn't support CHAP or PAP) can be automated by persuading
ip/ppp to call a command, in the manner of the -c option of con(1),
instead of reading user input.  You can use rc as a scripting language -
below is my quickly thrown together script for logging into Compuserve
(where 'cread -t N C' is a variant of read(1) which copies from stdin
to stdout until either a character C is encountered or N seconds elapse).

I could post the source for cread, and the change to ppp to call command
scripts, but they're both pretty obvious.

-- Richard