Re: [Expectperl-discuss] Gathering user input

[Greg L. <gl...@ey...>]

Hi Roland,

On Tue, Oct 30, 2001 at 04:13:20PM +0100, Roland Giersig wrote:
> > I'm trying to write a Perl script that will record user input to a 
> > program to allow that input to be "played" back and fed into the 
> > program multiple
> > times.  I'm sure I can do this with Expect, but I'm dropping my clue
> > somewhere along the way.  I've tried a number of combinations like:
> 
> There is a utility for Tcl/Expect called 'autoexpect' that does this, 
> maybe you should just port that to perl.  The problem with this task is 
> that you have to determine what the program prompt looks like so you 
> know when to send the next command.  This often means that you have to 
> put the script together by hand, so you also could just log the session 
> to a logfile and do that by hand, pasting the appropriate strings into 
> some send/expect template.

Right, autoexpect is exactly the kind of effect I was looking for.  Once
I have the appropriate program input though I just feed it to the next
program invocation with < however, so I don't need to put together an
expect/send script with what the user types, just get a hold of it :).

> > Any pointers of where I'm going wrong would be greatly appreciated!
> 
> Your code looks good in principle and should work.  Have you tried 
> setting $Expect::Exp_Internal = 1 to see what Expect is doing 
> internally?  $Expect::Debug could also be of help...

Thanks.  That did help.  The problem is that I listen to STDIN using
set_group().  Unfortunately the call to interact() does its own 
set_group() call to get the program listening to STDIN.  This clears
the listen group I had set up.  I tried to bypass this by duplicating
some of the interact() code and calling interconnect() directly but
without much luck.  I ended up just commenting out the clearing of
the listen group by set_group, which isn't the right solution, but
gets me going.

Have you considered an add_group/remove_group set of functions as
well as set_group?  interact() could then be modified to use that
rather than clearing the listen groups with its own set_group calls.

				regards, Greg
-- 
Greg Lewis                            Email : gl...@ey...
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