Ok, as far as I can see, there are two modes that you can can use Expect in. These are the normal and raw pty modes:

Normal mode (default)

In this mode all strings sent to the spawned command are echoed back to the pty. Also, these strings will be queued up for the expect commands. Therefore, the following code:

print $expect "StringToSend";
$expect->expect(15,"StringToWatchFor") or die "not found";
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might not do what you want. If the StringToSend to does not contain the StringToWatchFor then all will be ok. Otherwise the expect call will return from the sent string, not what might have been displayed by the spawned task. In this case, the best I can come up with would be to add another expect line, this time with the StringToWatchFor matching the previous StringToSend exactly.

If you do not have control over the actions of the spawned process, and you want the send strings to appear on the screen, then you will need to use this mode, and be careful over your expect calls. If either of the above is not the case, then I would use the raw mode, described below.

Raw mode

This mode has to be manually activated, and needs to be done before the spawn occurs. Therefore, instead of:

my $expect = Expect->spawn(....)

you need to do this:

my $expect = new Expect;
$expect->raw_mode(1);
$expect->spawn(....);
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One thing to note about raw mode, is that CR->LF translation will no longer be active. If you don't want this to happen, then there is a suggestion in the docs for disabling echo without activating raw mode, but I haven't tried it:

$expect->slave->stty(qw(-echo));

Looking at your sample code, the suggested soft_close call, in conjunction with moving the print line to after the expect, will result in the expected results to appear, and is a valid call to use. However, I would probably add another expect call, looking for something that will appear whatever the result of the test; in this case, it would have to be a carriage return. This way you can be sure that the spawned program really has done it's job, whereas soft_close will just wait up to 15 seconds for it to finish before blindly killing it.

Another way to carry out this example, modified from an example in the docs, is as follows:

$expect->expect(15,["name", sub { my $self = shift; 
                                  $self->print("PrimeLord\n"); 
                                  exp_continue; }],
                   ["\n", sub { exp_continue; }],
                   "\n");
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With this code, the exp_continue is required on each line except the last for the expect to continue processing, and also resets the timeout each time. To continue processing without resetting the timeout, exp_continue_timeout can be used. I have to admit that I haven't looked into how to determine when the processing stopped with this method.

Hope this has been helpful. Any questions, don't hesitate to ask,
Yoda