[Expectperl-discuss] Accumalation behaviour differs on different systems.

[KhAoZ <xk...@gm...>]

I've been developing with Expect on this one system, and I have a huge
code base that works perfectly fine on that server. However, I just
tried moving to another server (of the exact spec and OS), and I'm
getting a different behavior with the pattern matching with respect to
the command accumulation.

On the server that works, when I run a command, the pattern matching
behavior is as follows:

output line #1
 -> try all patterns
output line #1
output line #2
-> try all patterns
output line #1
outline line #2
output line #3
-> try all patterns
-> found a match
output line #4
... etc...

However, on this other server, the following happens:

output line #1
output line #2
output line #3
output line #4
output line #5
-> try all patterns

All the output from the command is accumulated immediately, and then
matched against the pattern, rather than matching every time a new
line is echoed from the command.

When I was developing on my original server, I built around the first
scenario, and now a lot of my code is breaking because I seriously
though thats how Expect worked: add one line to the accumulator each
time, and try the patterns. I really don't want to rewrite and retest
all the code so that it can work in both scenarios, is there anyway to
force the behavior of scenario one? Does anyone have an idea why the
behavior is different, is it maybe a system setting that can be
changed (Perl 5.8.3 on Solaris 10 for both servers, except the first
one is using an ActivePerl distribution).

I tried seeing if turning Multi-line off would help remedy the
situation, but that breaks a lot of code that makes use of $ and ^ in
the patterns. I can provide debug logs or clarify exactly how this is
breaking my code if anyone wishes.

Any help is appreciated.