Sending input to an interactive program

[cjanscen]

How can I send input to an interactive program? The program prompts me for a string to enter, and then I have to hit enter again..and I want to be able to do this from a shell script or a perl program...

I tried a simple thing lik this:


#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

print "string\n"



and then did:

./script.pl |./program

but it did not work...what do I have to do?

[jim mcnamara]

Redirect stdin to a script of answers

Suppose you have a script, foo, that asks two questions.
Write the answers to a tmpfile, so the file looks like this:

myfile.dat
no


Next redirect stdin like this and write errors and results out to two log files (for example)

foo < tmpfile 2>error.log > foo.log
rm -f tmpfile

[rid3r]

program $(/path/to/script.pl)

[bwkaz]

Originally posted by rid3r
program $(/path/to/script.pl) Only if "program" also has an option to take the input that you want to give it, on its command line.

$(/path/to/script.pl) runs /path/to/script.pl, takes its output, replaces all consecutive whitespace characters with a single space, and substitutes the result in on the command line of "program".

If "program" can't take what you're trying to give it on its command line, then you need to use a pipe (like you were posting) or redirect stdin (like jim mcnamara posted).

If neither of those two work, then something's seriously wrong. You aren't trying to pass a password to /bin/su, are you? Because su won't take the password from anywhere other than the keyboard, and there are better ways of doing root things without a password -- one of them is sudo.