Rather than bludgeon your way past good security and causing yourself more complications with expect, could you not use SSH keys to get password-less authentication in place? This will simplify thing tremendously and you would end up with code more like this:-

Code:

pushd $localdir

sftp $remoteusername@$remotehost <<-EOMGET
  cd $remotedir
  mget $filename*
EOMGET

popd

No need for a sleep attempt or anything. The process will exit when the mget completes.

I have added pushd before to set the required local directory & popd afterwards to put you back where you were beforehand, but these may be OS/shell specific and you haven't told us either. Another way would be OLDPWD=$PWD ; cd $localdir before and cd $OLDPWD afterwards, but it looks messier to me.

There are plenty of thread about setting up password-less authentication. Basically the client making the sftp request has to create a key-pair with ssh-keygen and send the *.pub file created to the server it wants to connect to. The content has to be added to the correct place on the server and then the connection can be opened. Have a search and let us know how you get on.



I hope that this helps,
Robin