Yup, it appears that I have some howework to do!
C
Steve Holdoway wrote:
>man expect may simplify this task. However, be warned - people have
>written books on expect alone!
>
>Steve
>
>On Tue, March 7, 2006 12:31 pm, chris bayley wrote:
>
>
>>Hi team....
>>
>>I have been whipping up a wee bash script to empty out the photos of my
>>digital camera to my storage device. It runs from ivman when the camera
>>is plugged in and the idea was to have as little user intervention as
>>possible. It started off as a small bash script that was all right if
>>you were watching on a terminal, but not robust enough to run
>>unsupervised.
>>I have come unstuck when trying to deal with CLI programs that expect an
>>input on stdin but give me a question on std{out/err} that has no
>>linefeed.
>>I have found it very tricky indeed to read stdout when there is no LF.
>>
>>Here is some example code:
>>
>>#/bin/bash
>>
>># init some files and a pipe to play with
>>touch file{1,2}
>>mkfifo pipe1
>>
>>catch_question()
>>{
>># with this read loop I would like to read from stdin (the std{out,err}
>>from cp)
>># problem is with the 'file exists, overwrite (y|n)?' type questions a
>>LF is often
>># not sent in order the the user input occurs on the same line.
>># hence 'read' seems unusable in this context ?
>> while read LINE
>> do
>> # if I find something of concern then I will do my own UI for
>>the question?
>> if echo "$LINE"|egrep 'overwrite.+?' > /dev/null
>> then
>> if kdialog --yesno "$LINE" # your choice of UI here
>> then
>> # and copy a response to the pipe for the blocked cp
>> echo "y" > pipe1
>> else
>> echo "n" > pipe1
>> fi
>> fi
>> done
>>}
>>
>># here I have a cp that complains of existing files
>># stderr and stdout are combined and piped to 'catch_question'
>># cp is expecting responses from the named pipe 'pipe1'
>>
>>cp -iv file1 file2 2>&1 < pipe1 | catch_question
>>
>>#clean up
>>rm file1 file2 pipe1
>>
>>
>>
>>So, if anyone has some ideas about how to read 'incomplete' lines from
>>stdin or approaches to the task above I'd love some new ideas.
>>Meanwhile I'm off to 'man expect' - I may be some time!
>>
>>: )
>>ChrisB
>>
>>
>>
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