Well chalk this up to not paying attention to the output. Expect was working as expected (bad pun intended). The issue turned out to be that the 'sh ver' command contains the device name. I was looking for the device name in the expect statement. Therefore, the expect was stopping mid output. I used your example of getting the various return items to get the last character in the prompt, which I concatenated to the device name for future prompts. I had to wait until the password was successful to get that bit of information (the $after). This matters as some devices use '#' and some use '>'.