Re: [Expectperl-discuss] How not to receive my own STDOUT?

[Kilian A. F. <fo...@in...>]

Austin Schutz writes:
 > On Thu, Feb 28, 2002 at 06:04:04PM +0100, Kilian A. Foth wrote:
 > > 
 > > I'm trying to fool a proprietary program into thinking it is talking
 > > to a terminal when it is really talking to another program. Here is a
 > > minimal version to show my problem:
 > > 
 > > our $pid = Expect->spawn("cat") or die "Couldn't spawn, $!";
 > 
 > 	I guess I don't understand what you expect to accomplish by this.
 > By spawning cat you are.. well.. catenating from STDIN to STDOUT. If you want
 > to interact with a program then why not spawn the program?
 > 

OK, example too minimal...

The actual program is a part of speech tagger that reads words from
its STDIN and writes tags to its STDOUT. I want to handle it through
Expect so it will think it's talking to a terminal and not buffer its
output. (It's closed source, so I can't hack it.) The real spawn is
this: 

our $pid = 
 Expect->spawn("/opt/pkg/tagger/bin/tagger",
               "-v0", "-z$args{z}", "$args{l}", "-")
 or die "Couldn't spawn, $!";

The tagger reads words such as:

das

and answers with tags such as:

ARTDEF

Since I don't know what it's going to answer, I have to expect
everything:

my @comm = $pid->expect(1,'-re',"^.*");

But then the first expect call picks up "das", and the next gets
"ARTDEF". I thought $pid->expect() was supposed to read the child's
output, not its input. Am I mistaken?