Expect and Spawn with PowerShell

Question

Is there any way to do expect and spawn with powershell. I have to parse a CLI program with powershell which is asking for password is there any way to input this password via powershell. In perl or python even in bash you can use expect/spawn Is there any solution in powershell ?

Answer 1

One way to do this would be to create a text file with the encrypted password one time, then call this file as the password in as many scripts as necessary.

Create the password file once:

$pwd = Read-Host 'Enter password for encrypting:' -AsSecureString | ConvertFrom-SecureString | Out-File -Path 'C:\SpecialFiles\CLIPassword.txt'

Then you can use it whenever it's needed:

$pass = (Get-Content -Path 'C:\SpecialFiles\CLIPassword.txt' | ConvertTo-SecureString)
$creds = New-Object -TypeName System.Management.Automation.PSCredential -ArgumentList (<insert CLI UserName>, $pass)

Then when you need to supply the username and password to your script, you simply pipe

$creds | <command>

or if the command supports the -Credential parameter

<command> -Credential $creds

If your command needs the user name and password entered separately, you can do that by specifying the property name:

<command> -UserName $creds.UserName -Password $creds.Password

Answer 2

You can use Read-Host to prompt the user for input. See here for more information.

$pass = Read-Host 'What is your password?' -AsSecureString
$decodedpass = [System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::PtrToStringAuto([System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::SecureStringToBSTR($pass))

I'm sure what you want to do with spawn, but you can execute other scripts or executables by just calling them

.\MyOtherScript.ps1