Shell Programming and Scripting

Gents,

I have a wrapper script passing couple of information to an expect script mainly responsible for spawning scp and providing the password (which is transmitted down from the main script). the main script prepare the transfer to couple of servers, idea being to transfer the files in parallel to all servers.

Could not figure out how to put the scp in background in order to speed up the transfer and avoid waiting for them in sequence ?

Here is the expect script

Code:

#!/usr/bin/expect -f 
 
set user [lindex $argv 0] 
set host_name [lindex $argv 1] 
set password [lindex $argv 2] 
set remote_dir [lindex $argv 3] 
set work_dir [lindex $argv 4] 

log_user 0
#exp_internal 1 
spawn  scp -q ${work_dir} ${user}@${host_name}:${remote_dir}  

expect {
-re ".*es.*o.*" {
exp_send "yes\r"
exp_continue
}
-re ".*sword.*" {
#exp_send "script\r"
exp_send $password\r 
#exp_continue
}
}
interact  

#if {[fork] != 0} exit
#disconnect

#exit 1

Tahnks.

You can use the & character:

Code:

exec/spawn scp ... &

That you're having to shoehorn a stored plaintext password into scp's otherwise secure authentication system with expect is a subtle hint, writ in mile-high flashing neon letters: You're not supposed to do this. It's designed to stop you doing this for security reasons, use pre-shared keys instead -- it's what they're there for. There's instructions for it plastered all over the internet. They do exactly what you want except they don't have the security problems of storing a plaintext password, and don't have the poor reliability and extra wait and extra software requirements of an interactive input manually brute-forced with expect.

I fully agree.
Such an automatism should be implemented using PKI.