checking command suggestions with Net::SSH::Expect

himanshu.chauhan has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi Monks,

I'm new here and need to implement a certain automation for linux process. But I'm stuck at a point where first I need to check a command suggestions before executing the actual command depending on certain condition. By command suggestion, I mean the suggestion or next steps displayed for a command when we press <TAB><TAB>. I have tried doing the following things but not even a single one worked:

$connection = Net::SSH::Expect(); #connection to a server
$connection->send("\t\t");
$connection->get_expect()->send("\t\t");
$connection->send("011");
$connection->get_expect()->send("011"); # octal for tab
[download]

So basically once sending <TAB><TAB> characters, I can read suggestions using $connection->read_all() but not able to figure out how to get suggestions using tab. It would be great if any of you amazing monks can guide me through this mountain!

Thank you in advance!

Comment on checking command suggestions with Net::SSH::Expect Select or Download Code

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Re: checking command suggestions with Net::SSH::Expect by haukex (Archbishop) on Jul 02, 2020 at 19:49 UTC
I'm not sure whether this will help, but have a look at Important Nodes About Dealing with SSH and Pseudo-Termials in the module's docs. What you're trying to do is trigger the shell's autocompletion, which is very dependent on the shell, for example bash has Programmable Completion, but it's up to the vendor to distribute the scripts that feed this functionality, for example Debian-based systems have the package bash-completion that contains a very complex set of scripts. You'll probably see differences in the autocompletion from version to version, and very likely from vendor to vendor. Using this in an automated fashion is likely not going to be very robust. This seems to me like it might be an XY Problem. What exactly are you trying to figure out via the shell completion? If you want to know if a certain program is somewhere in the `PATH`, try which.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: checking command suggestions with Net::SSH::Expect by perlfan (Vicar) on Jul 04, 2020 at 07:05 UTC
My initial thought was to search your `PATH`, but if you know what you want `which` is certainly the tool you should use as suggested below. I also thought at first you wished to trigger the the `bash` readline support for history, `ctrl-r`. If that's the case (probably not), then you may also wish to directly peek at `$HOME/.bash_history`. For a more portable approach, to the solution to the first problem, it's also rather trivial to break `PATH` into a list of directories, then to use `find` to facilitate the listing of their contents in terms of their full path location: `for d in $(echo $PATH \| tr ':' '\n'); do find $d -type f; done` [download] Or as sent via an ssh command, `ssh you.remote.host "for d in \$(echo \$PATH \| tr ':' '\n'); do find \ +$d -type f; done"` [download] `find` is also pretty darn flexible, and if you do not wish to use it then there are other utilities you may use to list the contents of each directory in `PATH` like `ls`.	[reply] [d/l] [select]


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