I have a device that does not support many connections. If it times out during a telnet session, I'm forced to re-cycle the unit. I am using Expect.pm and just snagged the example code in it's perldoc. Normally, the timeout would not be a problem but it is because this device is not a workstation. Here is the output I see

Escape character is '^]'.
Ubuntu 8.04.1
scriptbed login: $VAR1 = bless( \*Symbol::GEN0, 'Expect' );
scriptbed
Password:
$VAR1 = [
          bless( \*Symbol::GEN0, 'Expect' )
        ];
Can't call method "do_soft_close" on unblessed reference at ./myexpect
+.pl line 57.
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Here is the full code

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
  2
  3 BEGIN {
  4 unshift(@INC,'/n/home5/release/Perl/Modules/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.
+8.0');
  5 }
  6
  7 use strict;
  8 use Expect;
  9 use Data::Dumper;
 10
 11 my $timeout = 1;
 12
 13 my $username = 'scriptbed';
 14 my $password = 'invalid';  # forcing the timeout
 15
 16 print localtime(time)."\n";
 17
 18   my $exp = Expect->spawn('/usr/bin/telnet','scriptbed');
 19
 20   my $spawn_ok;
 21   $exp->expect($timeout,
 22                [
 23                 qr'login: $',
 24                 sub {
 25                   $spawn_ok = 1;
 26                   my $fh = shift;
 27                   print Dumper $fh;
 28                   $fh->send("$username\n");
 29                   exp_continue;
 30                 }
 31                ],
 32                [
 33                 'Password: $',
 34                 sub {
 35                   my $fh = shift;
 36                   print $fh "$password\n";
 37                   exp_continue;
 38                 }
 39                ],
 40                [
 41                 eof =>
 42                 sub {
 43                   my $fh = shift;
 44                   $fh->do_soft_close();
 45                   if ($spawn_ok) {
 46                     die "ERROR: premature EOF in login.\n";
 47                   } else {
 48                     die "ERROR: could not spawn telnet.\n";
 49                   }
 50                 }
 51                ],
 52                [
 53                 timeout =>
 54                 sub {
 55                   my $fh = shift;
 56                   print Dumper $fh;
 57                   $fh->do_soft_close();
 58                   die "Timed out\n";
 59                 }
 60                ],
 61                '-re', qr'[#>:] $', #' wait for shell prompt, then 
+exit expec    t
 62               );
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