Why is my expect script failing on line 1? [closed]

Question

The very first line of my expect script fails. Here are the entire contents of my script and it fails:

#!/usr/bin/expect -f

And it fails right off the bat with

": no such file or directory

as my response. Expect is in fact installed and is located in /usr/bin/ and I am running this from root. I have no extra spaces or lines before the # sign either. Of course there was more to the script originally but it fails way before it gets to the good stuff.

Answer 1

Tried it and here is the result: /usr/bin/expect^M: bad interpreter

Is it possible that there's a Windows newline (the ^M) in there that's confusing the script? You can try od to see what newline character(s) is after the expect and tofromdos or an editor (e.g. emacs in hexl-mode) to remove it. See the man pages for more info.

Answer 2

I had this issue and found I didn't have the expect interpreter installed! Oddly enough, if you ran the command in the shell it worked. However, through a shell script I got this error:

/usr/bin/expect: bad interpreter: No such file or directory

I fixed it by simply installing the Expect interpreter. The package name that was chosen was: expect libtcl8.6

Just run:

sudo apt-get install expect