Expect in a shell script

[rbhagwandin]

First of all, hello!

I'm trying to create a line of code, using expect within a shell script, that will assign a variable the value of "grep -c "Hi" /home/myAccount/file



count=$(expect -c "spawn ssh root@127.0.0.1 \"grep -c \"Hi\" /home/myAccount/file\"
expect \"*?assword*\"
send \"supersecurepassword\r\"
")


I'm using a different IP address (obviously) and a different file, but the structure is more or less the name.

This is what I've got so far. When run without the expect stuff as:

count=`ssh root@127.0.0.1 "grep -c Hi /home/myAccount/file"`
it works perfectly, setting count to the number of lines containing Hi, as it should.

Any ideas? With the expect code, $count ends up being the console output (the command run and the prompt for the password)

[moot.xk]

I used expect within bash scripts for a long time to do exactly what you are doing now. It works for most purposes I guess, but you'll get headaches when your passwords contain special characters. Expect likes to read them in as variables instead of chars.

Try doing a more "preferred" method of ssh keys and ssh commands.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SSHHowto#head-1ff9e61cfd81e9f741920b6920af8a85f7bddb30

Once you have your keys setup properly, you'll be able to do something like:


$OUTPUT=`ssh remotehost 'whatever command'`


The output for "whatever command" is assigned to the OUTPUT variable.

For your script, it's easy enough to plug in the command you want:


$OUTPUT=`ssh remotehost 'grep -c "Hi" /home/myAccount/file'`


Be careful with your apostrophes, backticks and escapes. If you don't already understand explicit versus loose quoting, go read up on it ASAP.
http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html#Quoting

[geirha]

Any reason why you're not using key-based or host-based authentication?