Hi Roger
Thanks for answering. I sent the message a number of times as it was not answered and a huge number of mails came in in the intirim causing my mail to be buried. This lessens the chance of me getting an answer.
The problem I have is that I don't want my password hardcoded anywhere in my scripts (for security). I want to telnet into the host and cd to a directory. So in essence I need to be able to interact with the script mid-script to send in my password and then return the script to doing its business

Here is how it can be done in tcl Expect:

#!/usr/dist/exe/expect -f

set timeout -1
set hostname blah
set login_name blah_blah
spawn $env(SHELL)
match_max 100000
send -- "telnet $hostname\r"
expect "login:"
send -- "$login_name\r"
expect "Password:"
interact -nobuffer -re "(.*)\r" return
#ask user for password and then return to script

send -- "cd $dir\r"
interact
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Now I am trying to translate this into perl (as tcl has some pecularities I don't really like. Heres what I came up with:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use Expect;
my $session = new Expect;

my $server_connect = "blah";
my $username = "blah_blah";
my $shell_prompt= '(.*%|.*#|.*>|.*\\$) $';
my $dir="blah_blah_blah";

$session->spawn("bash");

print $session "telnet $server_connect\r";
$session->expect(60, -re, "ogin:");
print $session "$username\r";
$session->expect(10, -re, "assword:");
$session->interact(\*STDIN, "\r");
$session->expect(60, -re, "$shell_prompt");
print $session "cd $dir\r";
$session->interact();
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The problem is that the line:

$session->interact(\*STDIN, "\r");
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does not act in the same way as the line

interact -nobuffer -re "(.*)\r" return
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does in tcl
I was wondering if anyone could elaborate why this is so?
thanks in advance