rexpect
Spawn, control, and respond to expected patterns of child applications and processes, enabling the automation of interactions and testing. Components include:
- session: start a new process and interact with it; primary module of rexpect.
- reader: non-blocking reader, which supports waiting for strings, regex, and EOF.
- process: spawn a process in a pty.
The goal is to offer a similar set of functionality as pexpect.
Maintainers wanted
I have created rexpect as a project to learn rust and linux. But now due to some reasons I haven't used Rust in the past 2 years, so I can't keep up with the latest features/crate dependencies
It has become hard now to judge pull requests. If you would be willing to either take over this repo entirely or join in as a maintainer to help evaluate PR please contact me.
Examples
For more examples, check the examples directory.
Basic usage
Add this to your Cargo.toml
[dependencies]
rexpect = "0.4"
Simple example for interacting via ftp:
extern crate rexpect;
use rexpect::spawn;
use rexpect::errors::*;
fn do_ftp() -> Result<()> {
let mut p = spawn("ftp speedtest.tele2.net", Some(30_000))?;
p.exp_regex("Name \\(.*\\):")?;
p.send_line("anonymous")?;
p.exp_string("Password")?;
p.send_line("test")?;
p.exp_string("ftp>")?;
p.send_line("cd upload")?;
p.exp_string("successfully changed.\r\nftp>")?;
p.send_line("pwd")?;
p.exp_regex("[0-9]+ \"/upload\"")?;
p.send_line("exit")?;
p.exp_eof()?;
Ok(())
}
fn main() {
do_ftp().unwrap_or_else(|e| panic!("ftp job failed with {}", e));
}
Example with bash and reading from programs
extern crate rexpect;
use rexpect::spawn_bash;
use rexpect::errors::*;
fn do_bash() -> Result<()> {
let mut p = spawn_bash(Some(2000))?;
// case 1: wait until program is done
p.send_line("hostname")?;
let hostname = p.read_line()?;
p.wait_for_prompt()?; // go sure `hostname` is really done
println!("Current hostname: {}", hostname);
// case 2: wait until done, only extract a few infos
p.send_line("wc /etc/passwd")?;
// `exp_regex` returns both string-before-match and match itself, discard first
let (_, lines) = p.exp_regex("[0-9]+")?;
let (_, words) = p.exp_regex("[0-9]+")?;
let (_, bytes) = p.exp_regex("[0-9]+")?;
p.wait_for_prompt()?; // go sure `wc` is really done
println!("/etc/passwd has {} lines, {} words, {} chars", lines, words, bytes);
// case 3: read while program is still executing
p.execute("ping 8.8.8.8", "bytes of data")?; // returns when it sees "bytes of data" in output
for _ in 0..5 {
// times out if one ping takes longer than 2s
let (_, duration) = p.exp_regex("[0-9. ]+ ms")?;
println!("Roundtrip time: {}", duration);
}
p.send_control('c')?;
Ok(())
}
fn main() {
do_bash().unwrap_or_else(|e| panic!("bash job failed with {}", e));
}
Example with bash and job control
One frequent bitfall with sending ctrl-c and friends is that you need to somehow ensure that the program has fully loaded, otherwise the ctrl-* goes into nirvana. There are two functions to ensure that:
executewhere you need to provide a match string which is present on stdout/stderr when the program is readywait_for_promptwhich waits until the prompt is shown again
extern crate rexpect;
use rexpect::spawn_bash;
use rexpect::errors::*;
fn do_bash_jobcontrol() -> Result<()> {
let mut p = spawn_bash(Some(1000))?;
p.execute("ping 8.8.8.8", "bytes of data")?;
p.send_control('z')?;
p.wait_for_prompt()?;
// bash writes 'ping 8.8.8.8' to stdout again to state which job was put into background
p.execute("bg", "ping 8.8.8.8")?;
p.wait_for_prompt()?;
p.send_line("sleep 0.5")?;
p.wait_for_prompt()?;
// bash writes 'ping 8.8.8.8' to stdout again to state which job was put into foreground
p.execute("fg", "ping 8.8.8.8")?;
p.send_control('c')?;
p.exp_string("packet loss")?;
Ok(())
}
fn main() {
do_bash_jobcontrol().unwrap_or_else(|e| panic!("bash with job control failed with {}", e));
}
Project Status
Rexpect covers more or less the features of pexpect. If you miss anything I'm happy to receive PRs or also Issue requests of course.
The tests cover most of the aspects and it should run out of the box for rust stable, beta and nightly on both Linux or Mac.
Design decisions
- use error handling of error-chain
- use nix (and avoid libc wherever possible) to keep the code safe and clean
- sadly,
expectis used in rust too prominently to unwrapOptions andResults, useexp_*instead
Licensed under MIT License
3 Feb 2, 2022
5 Apr 8, 2022
5 Nov 6, 2022
15 Dec 24, 2022
2 Nov 17, 2022
6 Mar 15, 2023
8 Apr 17, 2023
3 Aug 21, 2023
29 Oct 9, 2023
5 Mar 5, 2023
6 Mar 29, 2023
4 Aug 11, 2023
20 Nov 11, 2022
8.7k Dec 31, 2022
326 Dec 21, 2022
1 Apr 10, 2022
13 Dec 6, 2022
7 Mar 30, 2023
4 May 4, 2023