I attempted <a href=”http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif“>expect scripting
for the first time today. I must say, if I used it more, I’d be writing
a complete tutorial to it. I had trouble finding a good, verbose,
tutorial on it. As it is, I’ll just post a (working) version of my scp
script that uses expect to automate the process:

#!/usr/bin/expect  --set localfile [lindex $argv 0]
set timeout 30
spawn /usr/bin/scp $localfile user@host:~remotedirexpect {
"password:" {
send "mypass\r"
interact        }
"yes/no)?" {
send "yes\r"
set timeout -1        }
timeout {
exit        } eof {
exit        }}

What this does, is take an argument off the command line as the local file,
and copies it to the remote server as hard coded in the file. I wanted
to keep it simple, but the two things I wanted to point other that I
had (a little) trouble finding are:1. To access command line
variables, it’s kind of funky. So you will want to declare normal local
variables at initialization like:set localfile [lindex $argv 0]With $argv 0 being the first argument. I couldn’t get this to work with the C-style $argv[0] – it causes a syntax error.2. When you are <span style=”font-weight: bold;”>spawning a command that actually does something and prints information to the screen, you need to tell expect to <span style=”font-style: italic;”>interact. Otherwise, it will just quit after performing the operations you tell it to explicitly.