From: James Edward Gray II <james@...>
Date: 2007-09-25T07:29:55+09:00
Subject: Re: communicating w/ command-line program (OR ruby expect)

On Sep 24, 2007, at 5:18 PM, Cameron Matheson wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On 9/24/07, yermej@gmail.com <yermej@gmail.com> wrote:
>> If you need to interact with something (a la irb, ftp, telnet, etc.)
>> you'll need to find something else, I think.
>
> This is what I'm looking for (something to interact w/ a program that
> has an ftp-like interface).

For FTP use Net::FTP, of course.  Otherwise, Ruby does ship with a  
simple expect library:

$ cat /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/expect.rb
$expect_verbose = false

class IO
   def expect(pat,timeout=9999999)
     buf = ''
     case pat
     when String
       e_pat = Regexp.new(Regexp.quote(pat))
     when Regexp
       e_pat = pat
     end
     while true
       if IO.select([self],nil,nil,timeout).nil? then
         result = nil
         break
       end
       c = getc.chr
       buf << c
       if $expect_verbose
         STDOUT.print c
         STDOUT.flush
       end
       if mat=e_pat.match(buf) then
         result = [buf,*mat.to_a[1..-1]]
         break
       end
     end
     if block_given? then
       yield result
     else
       return result
     end
     nil
   end
end

__END__

Hope that helps.

James Edward Gray II