On Tue, 25 Sep 2007 11:25:44 +1000, "Robert Thorsby" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > On 2007.09.25 11:07 Sonia Hamilton wrote: > > I'm starting to learn expect [1][2] to help me > > automate some programs that prompt for input. > > Expect dates from the early 90s - is it the > > right way to go or is there now a better shinier > > tool/language that I should be learning? > > I prefer to use one of the *dialog utilities (ie, dialog, kdialog, > gdialog, or -- my dialog-du-jour -- Xdialog) in a shell script and > validate the user input in the script. It looks a helluva lot better > than expect via a command line. It's prolly also more versatile.
Not sure how *dialogs would help :-) I want to (as a simple example) update my password on n *nix machines using the passwd command, which prompts me to enter my old password then new password twice. With expect I can automatically feed in the old and new passwords when prompted as passwd is run via ssh on each of the n machines. I could also (for example) use awk/perl/tool-du-jour on /etc/shadow on each machine, but that's nasty, especially across different Linuxes/SunOSs/versions. -- Sonia Hamilton -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
