Expect scripts cannot match

Question

I am using the Community Edition of ActiveTcl from ActiveState on Windows with the Expect package installed. I have tried writing my own scripts, downloading some from various websites, and even copying and pasting them from the ActiveState website itself, but I always run into the same problem. My scripts can send commands perfectly and configure network devices as expected, but only by sandwiching sends with sleep periods. Whenever I try matching anything with expect, I always get the same thing (when using exp_internal 1): expect: does "" (spawn_id exp4) match glob pattern "AnyString"? no. And the same thing for regular expressions: expect: does "" (spawn_id exp4) match regular expression "AnyString"? no. The only time it seems to work is with a single wildcard: expect: does "" (spawn_id exp4) match glob pattern "*"? yes expect: set expect_out(0,string) "" expect: set expect_out(spawn_id) "exp4" expect: set expect_out(buffer) "" But no other combination of wildcards, literal or regex, seem to work. I have watched videos and seen screenshots. From what I can tell expect should iterate each character until a match is found, but it literally just stops at "", times out, and continues on to the next line. I am sure I am doing something obviously fundamentally wrong if the expect command does not work in Expect, but I just don't know what. It's as if it cannot read any of terminal output, but the send commands work perfectly so I know it's connected. Whatever terminal program I am trying (telnet, plink, netcat, etc.) all have the same problem. Expect really seems to be an awesome automation tool, so I'd really appreciate any suggestions that might help me get over this. I am fully expecting to feel stupid after receiving the answer.

Answer 1

This is probably due to known issues with Expect on later versions of Windows, which are unfortunately poorly documented. Expect may work on Win7 or Win8, probably not on Win10. It will generally work better on 32-bit Windows than 64-bit Windows.