! Date: Wed, 9 Aug 95 08:43:57 CDT
! From: Mike Bender <mike@ce.UManitoba.CA>
! Subject: Integration in a DSS
!
! I have been using Grass 4.1 on its own, using command line codes. I go
! through the normal prompting upon typing 'grass4.1 <Enter>' such as
! database and mapset. ...
!
! My question is how to start grass up without the interactive prompting
! for database and mapset?
A smart man introduced me to the unix program 'expect' (Tcl based) which
might suit your needs, at least to some degree. The blurb from the man
page reads:
"Expect is a program that "talks" to other interactive pro-
grams according to a script. Following the script, Expect
knows what can be expected from a program and what the
correct response should be. An interpreted language pro-
vides branching and high-level control structures to direct
the dialogue. In addition, the user can take control and
interact directly when desired, afterward returning control
to the script."
Below is a bit of script that uses expect commands to run r.support
providing grass with answers to all the prompts:
#!/opt/bin/expect
spawn /opt/grass/source/sun4/bin/r.support
expect "*>*"
send "$filename\n"
expect {*[n]*}
send "n\n"
expect {*[n]*}
send "y\n"
expect {*[n]*}
send "n\n"
expect {*[n]*}
send "y\n"
expect {*>*}
send "4\n"
expect {*-->*}
send "\n"
expect {*[n]*}
send "n\n"
I don't know where our copy came from, but I'm certain you can find it
from some anonymous ftp source. Hope this gives you some ideas.
Vida Jakabhazy
vida@aer.com