Run commmands interactively using icommandlib or pexpect

However, if the command you want to run requires that:

• It prompts the user for a response (yes or no / password / etc.)
• It 'draws' on a terminal window - like 'top'.
• You want to interact with the process and do other stuff while it runs (e.g. wait for a database service to warm up and then continue).

Then you need an interactive library.

Commandlib can call and create an interactive process object for two other libraries this way - ICommandLib and pexpect.

The two examples below are not actually interactive but they demonstrate how pexpect and icommandlib can be used.

outputtext:

#!/bin/bash
echo hello $1

from commandlib import Command

icommandlib:

process = Command("./outputtext", "mark").interactive().run()
process.wait_until_output_contains("mark")
process.wait_for_successful_exit()

pexpect:

from pexpect import EOF
process = Command("./outputtext", "mark").pexpect()
process.expect("mark")
process.expect(EOF)
process.close()

Executable specification

Documentation automatically generated from icommand-or-pexpect.story storytests.