Expect command output parser sub

[Centaurus]

Description:

If you have ever used Expect to execute commands on a remote system I am sure you have run into the problem of parsing the command output from the output of the Expect methods exp_before(), clear_accum(), etc... . If you send your command to this subroutine it will parse the output for you and return the command output as it would be returned from a backtick execution. Note: This subroutine uses a global Expect object variable which already has an established connection. The subroutine will not take commands that end in & .. for those commands just use $expect->print method.

# Executes a command via a global expect object and
# returns the output of the command.
#
# Arguments:
#       1 - Command     <string variable containing the command string
+>
# Returns:
#       String variable cotaining the output of the specified command.
#

sub expect_execute($) {
        $expect->clear_accum();
        my $command = shift;
        my $x = '';
        my $temp = '';
        if ( $command =~ /;$/ ) {
                chop( $command );
        }
        print $expect "$command | sed 's/^/COMMAND_OUT: /g'; echo -n E
+ND_; echo EXPECT\n";
        $expect->expect( 300, -re => '^END_EXPECT' );
        my $result = $expect->exp_before();
        ( my @result ) = split( /\n/, $result );
        $result = '';
        foreach $x ( @result ) {
                $temp = $x;
                if ( chop( $temp ) eq "\r" ) {
                        chop( $x );
                }
                if ( $x =~ m/^COMMAND_OUT: / ) {
                        $temp = substr( $x, 13 );
                        $result = $result . $temp . "\n";
                }
        }
        return $result;
}