Pexpect - Examples
Author: Noah Spurrier
Description: Examples for using Pexpect.
Keywords: pexpect, Noah Spurrier, Python, Libes, TCL, Expect, pipe, popen, pyExpect, expectpy, expect-like, expect-alike, expect like

# Pexpect Examples

hive.py

> This script creates SSH connections to a list of hosts that you provide. Then you are given a command line prompt. Each shell command that you enter is sent to all the hosts. The response from each host is collected and printed. For example, you could connect to a dozen different machines and reboot them all at once.

script.py

> This implements a command similar to the classic BSD "script" command. This will start a subshell and log all input and output to a file. This demonstrates the interact() method of Pexpect.

fix_cvs_files.py

> This is for cleaning up binary files improperly added to CVS. This script scans the given path to find binary files; checks with CVS to see if the sticky options are set to -kb; finally if sticky options are not -kb then uses 'cvs admin' to set the -kb option.

ftp.py

> This demonstrates an FTP "bookmark". This connects to an ftp site; does a few ftp stuff; and then gives the user interactive control over the session. In this case the "bookmark" is to a directory on the OpenBSD ftp server. It puts you in the i386 packages directory. You can easily modify this for other sites. This demonstrates the interact() method of Pexpect.

monitor.py

> This runs a sequence of commands on a remote host using SSH. It runs a simple system checks such as uptime and free to monitor the state of the remote host.

passmass.py

> This will login to each given server and change the password of the given user. This demonstrates scripting logins and passwords.

python.py

> This starts the python interpreter and prints the greeting message backwards. It then gives the user iteractive control of Python. It's pretty useless!

rippy.py

> This is a wizard for mencoder. It greatly simplifies the process of ripping a DVD to Divx (mpeg4) format. It can transcode from any video file to another. It has options for resampling the audio stream; removing interlace artifacts, fitting to a target file size, etc. There are lots of options, but the process is simple and easy to use.

sshls.py

> This lists a directory on a remote machine.

ssh_tunnel.py

> This starts an SSH tunnel to a remote machine. It monitors the connection and restarts the tunnel if it goes down.

uptime.py

> This will run the uptime command and parse the output into variables. This demonstrates using a single regular expression to match the output of a command and capturing different variable in match groups. The grouping regular expression handles a wide variety of different uptime formats.