my question was to do with the use of the interact command in perl expect. This allows you to interact in real time with the script. I know that I can ask for the variables at the start of the script or even pass them in as parameters but I would like to know why the interact statement that I used does not work as all the documentation on it says it should. Becoming proficient with the expect.pm module means asking questions about some of the apparently unclear aspects of some of its functions