expect command spawns incorrectly

[Donald Russell]

On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 19:04, Steven W. Orr <steveo at syslang.net> wrote:

> On 11/28/09 19:13, quoth Donald Russell:
> >
> >
> > On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 15:47, Steven W. Orr <steveo at syslang.net
> > <mailto:steveo at syslang.net>> wrote:
> >
> >     On 11/28/09 02:43, quoth Donald Russell:
> >     > I am trying to use the expect program to automate an sftp
> process....
> >     >
> >     > The expect file begins with
> >     >
> >     > spawn sftp -oProxyCommand='....'  user at host
> >     > expect "password:"
> >     > send "sesame\n"
> >     > expect "sftp> "
> >
> >     Try this:
> >
> >     send "sesame\r"
> >
> >
> > I'll try that, but I'm not hopeful.
> >
> > The command that is spawned fails... I get the "usage" as if all that
> > was spawned was "sftp" and not the entire command. So it doesn't even
> > get to the "expect password" part, regardless of whether I'm using \n or
> > \r in the "send".
> >
> > And I gather there is no such character on the "spawn" line... the
> > command is just taken to be the literal characters up to the end-of-line.
> > Do I need to escape anything? As I mentioned, if I cut/past the command
> > into a shell.. it works fine... it's just got being spawned properly by
> > expect. (Or I'm doing something wrong :-( )
> >
>
> Ok. One last suggestion. It sounds like you might have a quoting problem.
>
>
> eval spawn "sftp -oProxyCommand='....'  user at host"
>
> I'm assuming that you are using the single quotes to contain an argument
> that
> may have possible embedded white space. In case there is no white space,
> it'll
> probably also work without the single quotes. By default spawn will echo
> what
> it's doing. You can stop that via the -noecho option.
>
> Don't forget that expect is not a language of its own. It's just an
> extension
> to the tcl language. tcl is what provides the eval. ;-)
>
>

Yes, I used single quotes because the -oProxyCommand= string contains
spaces.
So, I removed the quotes, and escaped the spaces... works fine now.

Lessons learned: "spawn" doesn't handle quoted strings properly.

Oddly enough, when spawn was echoing the command with the signle quotes and
spaces, the echoed command was correct... I could cut/paste it into a shell
unmodified and it worked. So, yes, there's something in the way spawn
actually spawns the command.

Anyway, it's working now and I can move forward. :-)

Cheers
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