DISCLAIMER: I still hate windows.

I spent a decent portion of today hunting around for a way to script or otherwise automate (at the command line) uploading a file to one of $wageslavery’s external vendors. After diddling with curl -T only to find that it only works if the destination file doesn’t exist, I finally bit the bullet and installed Cygwin. Cygwin provides a win32 version of expect, the command line automation tool and cadaver, the command line WebDAV utility, basically smbclient for WebDAV. Working example code after the break!

The script is applicable to any platform really, but what’s below on *nix platforms may or may not require the “\n” at the end of the send statements. expect sends “\r” at the end of the line by itself, and I suspect the Cygwin *nix utils running on Windows instead of *nix is probably the cause.

A practical, santized, example including dealing with a self-signed certificate:
spawn /usr/bin/cadaver https://upload.externalvendor.com/myuploads
expect "Do you wish to accept the certificate"
send "y\n"
expect "Username:"
send "starbuck\n"
expect "Password:"
send "0mgBACON\n"
expect "dav:"
send "lcd /path/to/data/files\n"
expect "dav:"
send "rm datafile.csv\n"
expect "dav:"
send "put datafile.csv\n"
expect "dav:"
send "quit\n"

Hopefully this helps some other poor soul stuck dealing with WebDAV uploads instead of proper sftp!

Update 2009-02-24: I added the word “script” a few times to help the Google search results. Maybe I’ll be #1 on “cadaver expect script”!