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Re: send commands to interactive prompt



Hi Ruairi,

I've used expect before in cases where I want to completely automate interactive programs. That's not what I'm looking for here. I want to send commands to a process already running in Terminal and also have the ability to switch to the terminal and use the program (matlab, python) directly. I scanned the wikipedia page you sent but couldn't tell if expect can be used in this way.


Kimo


On Jun 29, 2006, at 9:37 AM, RuairĂ­ O' Mahony wrote:

use "expect"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expect

-Ruairi

On Jun 29, 2006, at 2:31 PM, Kimo Johnson wrote:

Hi,

I'm looking for a way to send commands to an interactive program (matlab, python) running in Terminal. I have found 3 partial solutions, none are exactly what I would like, but all are close.

In TextWrangler, I can highlight text and then hit a keystroke to run a script on the selected text. I would like to be able to send this text to a currently running matlab or python session (ideally without bringing Terminal to the front every time). Here are the 3 partial solutions:

1) Use Terminal's "do script in window" capability
tell application "Terminal"
	do script text_to_execute in window 1
end tell

This works great for sending commands to a shell prompt without opening a new window each time. If I start an interactive program, however, the commands are no longer sent to the terminal.

2) Use System Events to type the string
tell application "Terminal"
	activate
	tell application "System Events"
		keystroke text_to_execute
	end tell
end tell

This works as well, though I need to bring Terminal to the front. The problem is that if I assign a keystroke in TextWrangler to execute this script, the keystroke seems to interfere with the call to System Events. For example, if the keystroke to execute the script has "command" in it and the string I'm trying to send has an "s", Terminal seems to get "command-s." If I execute the script by clicking the run button, it works fine.


3) Use iTerm instead of Terminal tell application "iTerm" tell current session of current terminal write text text_to_execute end tell end tell

This works the best of the three. Actually, it works perfectly for what I'm trying to do. I would rather not use iTerm though because of some unrelated bugs that make it not as nice as Terminal for interactive applications.

So the final question is: can I get the "do script in window" version (#1) to work if a program is running in the terminal?

Thanks.

Kimo



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-- Regards

RuairĂ­ O'Mahony
STE Automation
+ 353 (0)21 428 4393





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References: 
 >send commands to interactive prompt (From: Kimo Johnson <email@hidden>)
 >Re: send commands to interactive prompt (From: "RuairĂ­ O' Mahony" <email@hidden>)



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