NAME

porch, rporch — Utility to orchestrate command line tools

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

The porch utility allows scripted interactions with other command line tools.

All uses of porch follow a specific pattern: spawn a command, optionally write to its stdin, check for patterns in its stdout. The last two steps may be interleaved in interesting ways based on program behavior and interaction. When porch spawns a command, it sets up a new pts(4) and disables input echo on it. The command is not executed immediately, but instead waits for a release from the user script before processing. This is done so that the scriptfile may queue up some input to the program before it begins execution. See orch(5) for more detail on porch scripts.

The following options are available for both porch and rporch:

-f scriptfile

Uses the named scriptfile as the script to execute. Specifying “-” directs porch to read the script from stdin, and is the default behavior.

-h

Show a usage statement.

The following options are available for rporch only:

-e rsh

Execute the specified rsh program when spawning a command.

If a command is specified, then porch will spawn it before executing the specified scriptfile. Execution will still be stalled until released, as described above.

The rporch program is used to execute the scriptfile against programs on a remote host. The script is still primarily run on the executing host, but any spawned commands will be executed via the remote shell specified, in order of preference, by either the -e argument or the PORCH_RSH environment variable. If neither of these are set, “ssh” will be used. The specified rsh string will be subjected to word-splitting, and some naive quote handling will be employed.

ENVIRONMENT

PORCH_RSH

The remote shell progran to use for rporch connections.

EXIT STATUS

The porch utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs. A match() block failing is considered an error, unless it is within a one() block. All blocks in a one() block must fail to be considered an error.

SEE ALSO

expect(1), pts(4), orch(5)

AUTHORS

porch was written by Kyle Evans <kevans@FreeBSD.org> for the express purpose of testing tty(4) behavior.