Hi,

I was willing to use sftp for tranferring files from one server to another remotely using crontab. For that I am using expect instead of creating certificates for ssh. Now problem is with expect when I get the files to my local machine then I have to run some commands there on that files like moving it/renaming it. Now I cant use those shell commands on that expect prompt, not sure though. So have to use another script for those. Is there any way possible to put those commands in same script so that all happens at the same time.

first script to fetch files from remote server:
Another script to change & move that file:

wrapping expedct around this is a pretty horrible point to end up at. i'd suggest using sshfs to just mount it as if local over ssh and then just copy however you see fit.

but rsa key authentication is so so so much simpler than learning tcl for expect. what's your motivation for doing this? i'm totally lost.

As to what you're having problems with i'm really unclear, can you define a use case to show how you get stuck?

Hi,
As these are all local servers thats why I didn't thought of ssh way. Simply run expect to automatically provide password at periodic times using crontab to get files from remote server. Problem is, I was using two scripts; one for sftp to get the files, second one for copy and change ownership of those files which I want to be combined, which can done
as below

Thanks.

But you can achieve the same result password-less with an ssh-key-pair (as
Chris pointed out).
Much clearer and cleaner as far as I'm concerned (I hope I did
interpret your script correctly).


Cheers,
Tink

It's the use of the word "simply" that really concerns me. Expect is great, but this is not the place for it.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the security issues around exposing a password in a script.

Setting up an ssh key pair allows you to do what you want securely with just a few lines. I've done this when I'm running backup scripts. The backup script has to run as root, but I don't want root logins even with key pairs. So I have the script on one machine accessing another machine with a command embedded in ssh embedded in an su: `su - backup -c "ssh server2 \"mt status\""` for example. The user "backup" has key pairs set up, and it just works. Yours would seem to just require the simple `scp user@server1.x.x.x:/var/scripts/tests.txt /usr/local/apache` followed by the chown.

I've only used expect where I'm dealing with a menu driven system like a library catalog system (before they all went web), and there really wasn't an alternative there.

If you need guidance on setting up the key pair, see http://sial.org/howto/openssh/publickey-auth/

Thanks a lot you all.

I have been fighting the same issue, I had my scripts working perfect with expect and interact, until I went to cron. My problem is that I have to mget files and then rename each one to a new location. This would be a pain in an expect script. So here is what I did, maybe it would work for you.

I enabled rexec and issued a remote command to execute the script. expect/interact works through rexec. You can even setup a cron job to execute the remote command.

Thought it might help.