Parse the output of an expect variable and use it in a bash script

Question

I have a bash script that uses expect inside the bash script. This bash script will prompt for a password inside the expect part of the script and then return some output. I want to take that output and parse it so that it only displays a part of the output to me and stores that in a variable that the normal bash script can use. My script is:

#!/bin/sh

output=$(
/usr/bin/expect << EOF
spawn -noecho generate passcode -a 123456789
expect "passphrase:" { send "password\n" }
expect eof
EOF
#)
) | awk '/^ [a-zA-Z]*: (\S+)/'

echo $output

The output that I get without the awk regex is: Passcode: 543245324532455464 My regex will parse the output and only store the 543245324532455464 value in the output variable. That is what I hoped it would do. If I append the | awk '/^ [a-zA-Z]*: (\S+)/' to the end of the command, it returns nothing, just blank. If I take it off, it returns the output I expect.

Can anyone tell me how I can get the correct data stored into my variable in bash?

Answer 1

As written, you capture the output of /usr/bin/expect then pipe nothing to awk - the closing parenthesis of the command substitution needs to go at the end of the pipeline

not

... ) | awk '/^ [a-zA-Z]*: (\S+)/'

but

... | awk '/^ [a-zA-Z]*: (\S+)/')

---

Be aware that \S is non-standard (PCRE) and may not be supported in all versions of awk and that the capture group likely won't have any effect - you might do better with something like

awk -F': ' '$1 ~ /Passcode/ {print $2}'