Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I am using expect to ssh to a remote host and run a program on the remote machine which has a variable runtime. I need to wait until it finishes so I can grab the output file of this program. I am trying to use the output of grep to know when the process finishes. I am trying to capture the PID and use it in a loop to determine when it's finished, like this:

Code:

set program "nameOfProgram"
set psVar "ps -ef | grep $program | grep -v grep | {awk '{ print $2 }'}"

expect "$PROMPT" {   
    send "pidVar=`$psVar`\r"
}

while {1} {

    sleep $waitTime
    expect {
	"$pidVar*$PROMPT" {
	    send "$psVar\r"
	}
	"$PROMPT" {
	    sleep 1
	    break
	}
    }
}

The behavior of this code is that '$pidVar' is only visible in the remote shell, not in my expect script. If I replace the while loop with 'interact', I can echo $pidVar but I can't seem to use it in the while loop.

I seem to be missing something fundamental. Any suggestions??

vagabond1964