Documentation (Development)

The goal is to offer a similar set of functionality as pexpect.

Basic usage

Add this to your Cargo.toml

[dependencies]
rexpect = "0.1"

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(2000))?;
    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

extern crate rexpect;
use rexpect::spawn_bash;
use rexpect::errors::*;


fn run() -> Result<()> {
    let mut p = spawn_bash(None)?;
    p.execute("ping 8.8.8.8")?;
    p.send_control('z')?;
    p.wait_for_prompt()?;
    p.execute("bg")?;
    p.wait_for_prompt()?;
    p.execute("sleep 1")?;
    p.wait_for_prompt()?;
    p.execute("fg")?;
    p.send_control('c')?;
    p.exp_string("packet loss")?;
    Ok(())
}

fn main() {
    run().unwrap_or_else(|e| panic!("bash process failed with {}", e));
}

Project Status

What already works:

• spawning a processes through pty (threadsafe!), auto cleanup (killing all child processes)
• expect regex/string/EOF including timeouts
• spawning bash, interacting with ctrl-z, bg etc

What does not yet work:

• other repls such as python are not implemented yet

What will probably never be implemented

• screen/ANSI support (deprecated in pexpect anyway)

Design decisions

• use error handling of error-chain
• use nix (and avoid libc wherever possible) to keep the code safe and clean
• sadly, expect is used in rust too prominently to unwrap Options and Results, use exp_* instead