I'm making an rsync script and I'm using expect to enter the ssh password. However, afterward, is there anyway to get the rsync output to go to the terminal? I tried interact, but it waits until I hit enter before continuing with the output if I do that. I read a little about the spawn command and it seems there may be no good way to do this.

I'm using:
spawn rsync <various options>
expect "<password prompt>"
send "<password>"

This just spawns the process and returns immediately to the prompt. I want to see the output!

My ultimate plan is to make one expect script for each rsync command I want to run and then run them all from a bash script (which would be nice enough to wait for each script to complete before running the next one) so that all my backups can be made with one command.

EDIT:

tee doesn't seem to work with the expect spawn command btw

1) expect?? why not use preshared keys?

6.2b) The spawned process will not fork to the background, if that's what you're seeing, then the process muct presumably be completing rapidly for some other reason.

1) maybe I should look into using shared keys instead since I don't need anything more complicated than that (EDIT: in fact I don't; I have it working now using the following instructions: http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/152 )

but it could still be useful to know how to make expect do this

6.2b) The expect script is definitely not returning any output from the spawned rsync command to my terminal (my ssh terminal if that matters). I see the following almost immediately after executing the script:

spawn rsync -r -H -p -o -g -t -v -e ssh --delete /etc user@myserver.com:/spare
user@myserver.com's password:

And that's it. If I put an expect statement:

expect "bytes received"

...after the rsync command then it waits (apparently) until rsync the final line of rsync output before returning.

Are you saying the default behavior should be to show me the output? I'm not seeing it.

You should see output. Is there anything that could have turned the output off?
If it is turned off, you can restore it with:
log_user 1

Try also
exp_internal 1
for a debug trace.

As acip_kewpie said, shared keys is much easier, so if you can do that it is preferable.

jlinkels

Thanks, I have got it working with shared keys. I will try to explicitly set log_user 1 next time I try to use expect.