in reply to Expect prints command to console

Might help to make your code snippet runnable - what sort of Perl do you use ?

I wanted to give it a try, but my Perl doesn't know what 'crash' is, so I get only compile errors.

Is that
$cmd = "cd $tmp_dir; $^X $script $cmd";
line you have correct ? Isn't $cmd undefined when the string is evaluated ?