What's the best way to mix remote expect scripts and local bash commands?

Question

I'm automating tasks on a local and remote machine (behind a firewall). Once I'm done with tasks on the remote machine, I'd like the script to return to executing commands on the local machine.

#!/usr/bin/expect -f
set timeout -1
spawn ssh username@host
expect "Password: "
send "mypassword\r"
expect "username@host:~$"
...do some stuff...
send "exit\r"
expect eof

[then, once on the local machine, change directories and do other things]

What's the best way to append bash commands? I suppose I could start with bash, call expect within it, then simply return to bash once expect is done.

Answer 1

Expect is based on Tcl , so it can run the same commands. But if your goal is to run bash commands, the best bet is to run them from bash as a separate script, exactly as you propose in your last sentence.

Answer 2

It really depends on what your idea of ...do some stuff... is. Here's an example of something I recently did from my OSX w/s to an AWS instance

 export all_status
 init_scripts=($(ssh -q me@somehost 'ls /etc/init.d'))
 for this_init in ${init_scripts[@]};do
    all_status="${all_status}"$'\n\n'"${this_init}"$'\n'"$(ssh -q somehost \'sudo /etc/init.d/${this_init} status\')"
 done
 echo "$all_status" > ~/somehost_StatusReport.txt
 unset all_status

Passing a command at the end of the ssh command will cause the command to be run on the remote host. Or you can scp a script to the remote host and run it with

 ssh somehost '/home/me/myscript'

Answer 3

I met this situation recently too. I make a shell supexpect.sh which could login and execute command automatically. It will return to your local shell at the end.

#!/usr/bin/expect
#Usage:supexpect <host ip> <ssh username> <ssh password> <commands>
set timeout 60
spawn ssh [lindex $argv 1]@[lindex $argv 0] [lindex $argv 3]
expect "yes/no" {
    send "yes\r"
    expect "*?assword" { send "[lindex $argv 2]\r" }
    } "*?assword" { send "[lindex $argv 2]\r" }
send "exit\r"
expect eof

To execute:

./supexpect.sh 10.89.114.132 username password "ls -a;pwd;your_stuff_on_remote_host"

Note: The prompt might need to adapt to your own system, and of course you need to pass execute permission to it.