Hal9K:

I don't know what's wrong with Expect, but if you change:

$abi->send("$cmd\n") or die "Can't send to expect object: $abi->error(
+)";
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to:

$abi->send("$cmd\n") or die "Can't send to expect object: " . $abi->er
+ror();
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you may get a better error message than:

Can't send to expect object: Expect=GLOB(0x8eb92e8)->error() at /thres
+hNet/bin/xm-test line 41.
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As it stands right now, it's converting $abi into a string, without calling the error() member, so you're not getting a useful error message right now.

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.

Okay, I see. Thanks, since that helped me understand that whole situation. I'm getting an actual error message now (just the number 0), which supposedly represents the last item returned. Not very helpful, but that's because of Expect not documenting itself well.

HalNineThousand:

I was just looking at the Expect documentation, and the example looks different that your code. They didn't use new() to create the Expect object, instead they used spawn(). Also, they use spawn differently than you do. They have the command and arguments separated. So I think you should try changing the first few lines of your open_telnet subroutine to the following, and see if it helps.

sub open_telnet {
    my (@cmd, $res, $before, @parm);
    @cmd = ("telnet", "wogglebug");
    $abi = Expect->spawn(@cmd) or die "Can't do expect'";
    $res = $abi->expect(5, "/ #", "not known");
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...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.

roboticus, I should have included this. I tried that -- using the arguments separately, but it never seemed to work, at least not with the other program, so I left it that way with telnet when I tested. I found a number of examples and every example I found gave the command and arguments as just one string. But somehow it seems to work now -- doesn't seem to make a difference.

Thanks for picking up on that. It's probably several errors like that, all together, that are creating the problem.

I've got a working version. I'm still not clear on what I did with this that was different from the original, but I went back and wrote it from scratch (I didn't mention that I started with a version that almost worked, then stopped). I didn't copy or paste ANYTHING from the original, I started without sub routines and wrote a simple test, then broke it down into subroutines and got it working. I'll be looking through my old code to see the mistakes once I get time. Here's the working version:

#!/usr/bin/perl

    use Expect;

    our $abi;

    setup();
    sendcmd();

sub setup {
    $cmd = "telnet wogglebug";
    $abi = Expect->new();
    $abi->spawn($cmd);
    $res = $abi->expect(5, "/ #", "not known");
    print "Result: $res\n";
    if ($res != 1) {
        print "Failure to open process.\n";
        exit;
    }
    $before = $abi->before();
    show("Before", $before);
    $after = $abi->after();
    show("After", $after);
    $abi->clear_accum();


    return;
}

sub sendcmd {
    $abi->send("ls\n");
#    print $abi "ls\n";
    $before = $abi->before();
    $after = $abi->after();
    $res = $abi->expect(10, "/ #");
    show("Before command", $before);
    show("After command", $after);
    show("Result", $res);


    return;
}

sub show {
    my ($msg, $data) = @_;
    print "-----------------------\n$msg: $data\n---------------------
+--\n";
    return;
}
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Thanks for the help and when I see what it was that messed up the first version, I'll post it.