Help with expect

[jewel464g]

I first asked this question in the perl forum and was told about expect. So I'm hoping someone here can help me better. I have a perl script that runs this command at the command line.

/sbin/passwd $user

where $user contains the user name, when this is run it prompts for the password, my problem is that since it doesn't return control to the program until after a password is typed in, I can't pass it the password. I was told in the perl forum that I could use expect, but I have no idea how to do that. Can anyone help? Below is my script.
Thanks,
Jewel


#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use FileHandle;

open (FILE, "smusers.txt&quot || die "opening smusers.txt";

my @file = <FILE>;
for($index=0; $index<@file; $index++){
$str = $file[$index];
my ($user,$password) = $str =~ /^(.*?):.*.*?)$/;
`/usr/sbin/adduser $user -g pop -s /bin/false`;
`/sbin/passwd $user`;
`su - $user`;
`/var/qmail/bin/maildirmake $\HOME/Maildir`;
`exit`;
$SIG{CHLD} = 'IGNORE';
}

close (FILE); #close the old file

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[danielhozac]

This should input the password too:

open (PASSWD, "|/sbin/passwd $user");
print PASSWD "THE NEW PASSWORD\n";
print PASSWD "THE NEW PASSWORD\n";
close (PASSWD);

I haven't tested this, but it should work. Note the two print's printing the same, I'm not sure if those could be concatenated or not. You could try though. //Daniel