shell scripting with expect and a complex command line: no such file or directory

Question

I'm trying to make this work

#!/usr/bin/expect spawn "(psql blabla \"blabla sql;\" &> /dev/null) && (pg_restore -d xx my_file.sql &> /dev/null)" expect "Password for user my_base: " send "v" 

But I always get:

spawn (psql blabla "blabla sql;" &> /dev/null) && (pg_restore -d xx my_file.sql &> /dev/null) couldn't execute "(psql blabla "blabla sql;" &> /dev/null) && (pg_restore -d xx my_file.sql &> /dev/null)": no such file or directory 

What am I missing?

Answer 1

1) don't put the spawn arguments in quotes, and 2) spawn doesn't understand shell syntax, you need to explicitly spawn a shell

spawn bash -c {(psql blabla "blabla sql;" &> /dev/null) && (pg_restore -d xx my_file.sql &> /dev/null)} 

This uses braces, which are the expect/Tcl equivalent of shell's single quotes.

Answer 2

Although this is not really the answer to your question, but if you're trying to do a pg_restore without entering a password, you can also use the ~/.pgpass file to store credentials in.

Postgres documentation on ~/.pgpass -

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/libpq-pgpass.html