Why do I get "command not found" when running my Expect script?

Question

I have been playing with Expect/TCL today and I was hoping someone can tell me why the script below fails with:

: command not found  
./expect3: line 3: send: command not found

---

#!/usr/bin/expect -f

send " we are going to open up a file for reading, ok? \n"
expect "ok"

set fileopen [open "/home/aaron/text.txt" "r"]

set a [read $fileopen]
send "i am expecting to see a string from the file here $fileopen"

close $fileopen

Both the send and close commands fail, yet other scripts I had written with a spawn command seem to work fine?

Solution

Problem

The main problem is that you aren't separating your commands properly. Commands in TCL must be separated by newlines or semi-colons.

Solution

In general, you should only have one Expect or TCL command per line, unless you have a properly-formed compound statement. For example, this revised snippet will work:

#!/usr/bin/expect -f

send "We are going to open up a file for reading, ok?\n"
expect "ok"

because the send and expect commands are separated by newlines.

See Also

http://tmml.sourceforge.net/doc/tcl/Tcl.html