Bash scripting with expect. Set parameters to multiple test boards - bash

Question

I'm working on a small project for school. I'm using 15 or so tuners to emulate a Cell network. I'm by no means well versed in scripting yet. I'm an EE who usually googles until I have some frankencode capable of my purposes.
The goal is the set up all the modules quickly so I thought to automate the process with a script. This requires ssh, and so far I have to manually type in the password each time. This morning I set up a basic test with both Expect and sshpass. In either case I can correctly log in, but not give instructions to the remote machine.
I was reading that sshpass has difficulty with sending remote instruction, correct me if I'm wrong.
/usr/bin/expect << EOF
spawn ssh root#<IP>
expect "(yes/no)?" #Are you sure you want to connect nonsense
send "yes\r"
expect "password"
send "$pass\r"
I tried a few things here to get the device to receive instruction
interact
cat /pathto/config.txt
#or
send "cat /pathto/config.txt
#the real goal is to send this instruction
sqlite3 /database.db "update table set param=X"
EOF

Answer 1

You might as well make it an expect script, not a shell script
#!/usr/bin/expect -f
and then pass the IP address to the script as a command line argument
expect myloginscript.exp 128.0.0.1 the_password
In the expect script, you'll grab that IP address from the arguments list
set ip [lindex $argv 0]
set pass [lindex $argv 1]
(Putting the password on the command line is not good security practice. You can research better methods of passing the password to your expect script.)
To use ssh, you'll be asked "are you sure" only the first time to connect, so let's make that conditional. That is done by letting the expect command wait for several patterns:
spawn ssh root#$ip
expect {
"(yes/no)?" {
send "yes\r"
# continue to wait for the password prompt
exp_continue
}
"password" {
send "$pass\r"
}
}
Once that is sent, you should expect to see your shell prompt. The pattern for this is up to your own configuration but it typically ends with a hash and a space.
expect -re {# $}
Now you can automate the rest of the commands:
send "cat /pathto/config.txt\r"
expect -re {# $}
# note the quoting
send "sqlite3 /database.db \"update table set param='X'\"\r"
expect -re {# $}
At this point, you'll want to log off:
send "exit\r"
expect eof
On the other hand, if you set up ssh private key authentication (see ssh-keygen and ssh-copy-id), you can just do this:
ssh root#IP sqlite3 /database.db "update table set param='$X'"
and not have to get into expect at all.