UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Just reporting back that I've had success (with limited testing). I have to say the "expect" command was not an easy one to get my head around and to get operational. (Lots of fiddly problems with strings not being recognised and output not coming out!) But after heading off on the wrong track by trying to do send/expect pairs (which I fully admit is due to the powerfulness and complexity of the tool) the working solution was an expect script using an interact command with a timeout option:

Code:

#!/usr/gnu/bin/expect -f
spawn run sm
interact {
        timeout 3600 {
                send -- "end\r"
                sleep 1
                send -- "end\r"
                sleep 1
                send -- "end\r"
                sleep 1
                send -- "end\r"
                sleep 1
                send -- "end\r"
        }
}

Thanks for the help, especially jgt for putting me onto "expect".

Wayne