Automate interactive transactions with Expect
Did you ever wish you could automate your interaction with a program, making a script that can smartly handle an interactive session? You can -- with Expect, an extension to the Tcl programming language whose purpose is to communicate with interactive applications.
You can write Expect programs that automate live sessions, handling any tasks where a user interacts with the system. This suggests a multitude of uses, but where it has been most popularly applied is in software testing and in automating network transfers, such as site updates or downloads.
Expect is a product of the US government, having been created by Don Libes, a computer scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). It has been around for years, and while its functionality has stayed the same, the reason for using it keeps changing.
"Expect has always been a 'hole-plugger' in the sense that it only has value until existing holes in other tools are plugged," Libes says. Many of the holes it plugged in the past -- like scripting outbound email messages -- have been filled by new or improved tools. But there's still no shortage of holes that Expect can handle.
"After all, tools like telnet and ssh still offer very limited control, so Expect is useful there."
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