[Expectperl-discuss] Understanding interact

[Simon T. <si...@un...>]

Folks,

I am trying to understand the Expect.pm version of interact().

I have a telnet automation program written in tcl/expect that I am converting
to perl so that I can learn Expect.pm. The tcl version can telnet to a variety
of remote hosts, log in, handle any host-specific settings and then hand
control back to the user via interact:  

    send_user "$Prog: Handing control back to user on ${host}...\n";
    interact {
        "~~r" { send "tput rmso; clear\r" }
    }

This fragment does two nice things, 

  1) it looks for the "~~r" string from the user and responds to it and then 
      continues interacting, and 

  2) as soon as the spawned process exits, the interact loop ends.

I cannot start to get the equivalent functionality in the perl interact, ie:

    print "$prog: Handing control back to the user on $host...\n";
    $Expect::Log_Stdout=1;
    $telnet->interact(\*STDIN, "~~r");  

Am I doing something wrong?

Regards,

Simon Taylor
--
(+613 9568 2005)
Unisolve Pty Ltd 
Melbourne, Australia