Expect scripting

indienick · 09-20-2006, 06:18 PM

I have an Expect script that I can run, however, I'm having trouble (and I've searched through countless references) figuring out how to read through a file, assign each line to a variable, then "spawn" a command.

Here's the logical notation for it:

Code:

loop while not end of file {
   read from file and assign to variable
   spawn command
}

The file I'm reading from is full of server names, which are one per line:
server.1
server.2
server.3
...

I had written a Perl script to parse through the file then shoot the server name out to the Expect script, but lo and behold, the remote server that contains the access file doesn't have Perl! All I know about it is that it's an ancient HP-UX build, it has Expect libraries, and it's main shell is KornShell.

Before anyone suggests to "translate the Perl script into a KornShell script," I want to leave that to be a worst-case scenario-type deal.

acid_kewpie · 09-22-2006, 04:28 AM

i would personally take the approach of doing some expect and some ksh. just write a tiny wrapper script in ksh to read the file and run the expect script. never touched ksh myself, bu tin bash you'd say

Code:

for host in $(cat file.txt)
do
  expect script.exp $host
done

and then let expect do the same interactions it always was.

indienick · 09-22-2006, 08:56 AM

thank you very much, acid.

As for ksh, in some respects it's similar to bash, but in most qualities, it is its own beast - particularily with the parenthesis, different types of evaluations require different parenthesis styles. Ksh does some things more efficiently than bash, but ksh hasn't been "officially" updated since 1988, I believe.