Question for an Tcl/Expect Script.

[mrm5102]

Hello All,

Hopefully I'm in the correct place for this question, being that Expect is brought to us by the Tcl/Tk programmers I believe...?

I had a question regarding Exect Scripting if someone here could help me.

I am writing a script that will be called from a Bash Script as part of a program I am writing. Depending upon some command line options the
users includes, the Bash script will call this Expect Script I am writing and will open an SSH Session, login, run some commands, then exit...
The question has to do with saving aoutput into a variable.

I have this line, below. Which saves the "expected" output that it finds from a previous "send" command into a variable called "$expectedOutput":

expect {
	-re ".*#.*" { 
		send -- "ps auxww | grep -v grep | grep /path/to/script/bin/myScript\r"
		### This line sends the resulting output from the previous "send" command to the expect_out(buffer)...
		lindex [split $::expect_out(buffer) \n] 0 }
	}
	timeout		{ exit 3 }
	default		{ exit 13 }
}

expect {
	-re ".*#.*" {
		### This line saves the data stored in the expect_out(buffer) into a variable called "$expectedOutput".
		set extractedOutput $expect_out(buffer)
		puts "extractedOutput = --> \"$extractedOutput\"\n"
	}
	timeout		{ exit 4 }
	default		{ exit 14 }
}

So basically it is searching for a line that has a "#" (which would signify a command prompt). Next it runs the "ps auxww" command,
then the very next line (beginning with "lindex") will store the output from that "send" command into the "expect_out(buffer)".
In the next "expext { }" section you will see a line that starts with "set". That line will save the output in the variable "$expectOutput".

The problem is that when I save the output into a variable it causes the output of that send command to be suppressed. This can be a bit
of a problem because, if the output is being suppressed then there is nothing being printed to the screen that I would be able to "expect"
to be printed out in order to "send" some more commands.

Does anyone know if there is a work-around for this problem?
Any thoughts or suggestions would be great...!


Thanks in Advance,
Matt