My question is related to How to pass variables from a shell script to an expect script?
but its slightly different:
Apart from passing two runtime shell script variables, I want to pass a variable thats inside the shell script For eg:
#!/bin/sh
d=`date '+%Y%m%d_%H%M'`
expect -c '
expect "sftp>"
#use $d here(how?)
'
You don't need to pass a date variable into expect. It has a very good date command builtin:
expect -c '
# ...
set d [timestamp -format "%Y%m%d_%H%M"]
something_with $d
# ...
'
If you need to do more complicated date manipulation, read about the Tcl clock command
Another good technique to pass shell variables to expect (without having to do complicated/messy quoting/escaping) is to use the environment: export your shell variables, and then access them with expect's global env array:
export d=$(date ...)
expect -c 'puts "the date is $env(d)"'
This seems the wrong way to do things. You should set up SSH keys (with ssh-keygen and ssh-copy-id), google about this.
Anyway, try this :
#!/bin/sh
d=`date '+%Y%m%d_%H%M'`
expect -c "
something_with $d"
Note the double quotes instead of single quotes.
"Double quote" every literal that contains spaces/metacharacters and every expansion: "$var", "$(command "$var")", "${array[@]}", "a & b". Use 'single quotes' for code or literal $'s: 'Costs $5 US', ssh host 'echo "$HOSTNAME"'. See http://mywiki.wooledge.org/Quotes , http://mywiki.wooledge.org/Arguments and http://wiki.bash-hackers.org/syntax/words
" by \042
expect -c ' .... '"$d"'......'? Good luck.