Toby Corkindale <toby.corkindale@strategicdata.com.au> wrote:
The thing is, I'm working on a lot of machines via shell; when I think of it in advance, I script things up in Fabric to be automated, but when I'm just working ad-hoc investigating something, I'd like to be able to automate some common commands. (Not so much shell commands, as commands entered into programs run from the shell)
Those programs might have alias capabilities as the shell does, or even just commands to read input from a file.
If you ultimately do have to script terminal sessions, the only tool I know of is expect. Here's the Debian package description.
Thanks, however I'm aware of expect. It completely fails my requirement that the terminal remain completely interactive.
In that case, I think you're likelty to be out of luck, which is why I'm strongly suggesting that you rethink what the requirements are and find a better way to solve the problem.