Chapter 15. Interact
In earlier chapters, interact
was used in a very simple way. In reality, the interact
command simplifies many tasks and opens up a world of new problems that can be solved. In this chapter, I will describe the more common uses for interact
. In the next chapter, I will focus on using interact
with multiple processes.
The interact Command
In Chapter 3 (p. 82), I introduced the interact
command in the context of a script to automate ftp
. The script carried out the initial part of the procedure—entering the user name and password—and then returned control to the user by calling interact
.
The interact
command is much more flexible than that example demonstrated. interact
can also:
execute actions when patterns are seen from either a user or a spawned process
allow the user to take control of a spawned process, and return control to the script for further automated interaction, any number of times
suppress parts or all of an interaction
connect two or more spawned processes together, pairwise or in other combinations
Many of the things interact
does can also be done by expect
, but interact
can do them more easily and efficiently. In this sense, interact
is a higher-level command than expect
. In other ways, expect
and interact
are duals. They do the same thing but have a very different way of looking at the world. As I explain interact
, I will frequently bring up expect
to compare the similarities and contrast the differences between the two.
In its simplest form, the interact ...
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