Expect

Expect serves as a "glue" to link existing utilities together. The general idea is to try to figure out how to make Expect utilize the system's existing tools rather than figure out how to solve a problem inside of Expect.

A key usage of Expect involves commercial software products. Many of these products provide some type of command-line interface, but these usually lack the power needed to write scripts. They were built to service the users administering the product, but the company often does not spend the resources to fully implement a robust scripting language. An Expect script can spawn a shell, look up environmental variables, perform some Unix commands to retrieve more information, and then enter into the product's command-line interface armed with the necessary information to achieve the user's goal. After looking up information inside the product's command-line interface, the script can make an intelligent decision about what action to take, if any.

Every time an Expect operation is completed, the results are stored in a local variable called $expect_out. This allows the script to harvest information to feed back to the user, and it also allows conditional behavior of what to send next based on the circumstances.

A common use of Expect is to set up a testing suite, whether it be for programs, utilities or embedded systems. DejaGnu is a testing suite written using Expect for use in testing. It has been used extensively for testing gcc and is very well suited to testing remote targets such as embedded development.

One can automate the generation of an expect script using a tool called 'autoexpect'. This tool observes your actions and generates an expect script using heuristics. Though generated code may be large and somewhat cryptic, one can always tweak the generated script to get the exact code.

Installation problems are almost always resolved by installing from source rather than using someone else's copy of Expect. And start with modern copies of Expect and Tcl. If this doesn't fix things, send a bug report to the comp.lang.tcl newsgroup.

• PS: Provide complete (three-part usually) version numbers of Expect, Tcl, OS, and maybe even your compiler, configure output, and whatever else might be relevant. Finally, run your message by colleagues and make sure they can understand it without asking you any questions on what you meant. Clearer questions generate clearer responses.