Question

I have a bash script that does several tasks, including python manage.py syncdb on a fresh database. This command asks for input, like the login info for the admin. Currently, I just type this into the command line every time. Is there a way I can automatically provide these replies as part of the bash script?

Thanks, I don’t really know anything about bash.

I’m using Ubuntu 10.10.

Answer 1

I answered a similar question on SF, but this one is more general, and it’s good to have on SO.

“You want to use expect for this. It’s probably already on your machine [try which expect]. It’s the standard tool for any kind of interactive command-line automation. It’s a Tcl library, so you’ll get some Tcl skills along the way for free. Beware; it’s addictive.”

I should mention in this case that there is also pexpect, which is a Python expect-alike.

#!/path/to/expect
spawn python manage.py syncdb
expect "login:*"
send -- "myuser\r"
expect "*ssword:*"
send -- "mypass\r"
interact