I have a script that must perform a ‘sudo’ operation on each of a number of hosts. I’m trying to get expect working so I only have to enter it once, and have run into a couple of issues.

First, several examples suggest to use:

However, as soon as I enter the second ‘<', all of the quoting gets screwed up, and my script will terminate with an unexpected end of file. This is really strange, as I use the same mechanism with cat to write out files in other scripts.

Other examples suggest:

Doing it this way (and adding -d to expect), I get errors about no tty and a repeat of my password with an ‘n’ appended to the end, so it isn’t sending a newline (I’ve tried ‘r’ as well), but instead appears to be escaping the ‘n’

Since most of the examples I’m finding are from Linux, I expect (ha, ha, pun not intended!) that they’re using a GNU expect, and I’m using a BSD expect. I am reading through the man page, but the word “spawn” appears so many times, it could be quite a while before I stumble across the correct instance.

I’ve been monkeying around with different quoting and can get some slightly different results, but I just don’t know exactly what expect is expecting to see 🙂