I’m trying to communicate w/ a command-line process w/ ruby. I
thought IO.popen would be the right tool for the job, but I need to be
able to read and write to the process, and I can’t get it to work
(i’ve googled for examples, but everything I have seen is only doing
one-way communication). Anyway, it looks like what I need is
something like “Expect” for ruby. Does anyone know if such a tool
exists? (Or any other way in which I could read/write from a
command-line program).
If you’re just calling a command line tool like grep or something
(reads standard input and then returns result to standard out),
IO.popen is what you need:
cmd_output = IO.popen “cmd -args some stuff”, ‘r+’ do |pipe|
pipe.write the_input
pipe.close_write
pipe.read.chomp
end
if $? == 0
success, do something
else
cmd exited with an error, deal with it
end
If you need to interact with something (a la irb, ftp, telnet, etc.)
you’ll need to find something else, I think.
class IO
def expect(pat,timeout=9999999)
buf = ‘’
case pat
when String
e_pat = Regexp.new(Regexp.quote(pat))
when Regexp
e_pat = pat
end
while true
if IO.select([self],nil,nil,timeout).nil? then
result = nil
break
end
c = getc.chr
buf << c
if $expect_verbose
STDOUT.print c
STDOUT.flush
end
if mat=e_pat.match(buf) then
result = [buf,*mat.to_a[1…-1]]
break
end
end
if block_given? then
yield result
else
return result
end
nil
end
end
) but here you’ll find