Exploring Expect

09/27/2012 · No Responses

Expect is quickly becoming a part of every UNIX user’s toolbox. It allows you to automate Telnet, FTP, passwd, rlogin, and hundreds of other applications that normally require human interaction. Using Expect to automate these applications will allow you to speed up tasks and, in many cases, solve new problems that you never would have even considered before.

For example, you can use Expect to test interactive programs with no changes to their interfaces. Or wrap interactive programs with Motif-like front-ends to control applications by buttons, scrollbars, and other graphic elements with no recompilation of the original programs. You don’t even need the source code! Expect works with remote applications, too. Use it to tie together Internet applications including Telnet, Archie, FTP, Gopher, and Mosaic.

Don Libes is the creator of Expect as well as the author of this book. In Exploring Expect, he provides a comprehensive tutorial on all of Expect’s features, allowing you to put it immediately to work on your problems. In a down-to-earth and humorous style, he provides numerous examples of challenging real-world applications and how they can be automated using Expect to save you time and money.

Expect is the first of a new breed of programs based on Tcl, the Tool Command Language that is rocking the computer science community. This book provides an introduction to Tcl and describes how Expect applies Tcl’s power to the new field of interaction automation. Whether your interest is in Expect or interaction automation or you simply want to learn about Tcl and see how it has been used in real software, you will find Exploring Expect a treasure trove of easy-to-understand and valuable information.

Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Intro—What Is Expect?
Chapter 2. Tcl—Introduction And Overview
Chapter 3. Getting Started With Expect
Chapter 4. Glob Patterns And Other Basics
Chapter 5. Regular Expressions
Chapter 6. Patterns, Actions, And Limits
Chapter 7. Debugging Patterns And Controlling Output
Chapter 8. Handling A Process And A User
Chapter 9. The Expect Program
Chapter 10. Handling Multiple Processes
Chapter 11. Handling Multiple Processes Simultaneously
Chapter 12. Send
Chapter 13. Spawn
Chapter 14. Signals
Chapter 15. Interact
Chapter 16. Interacting With Multiple Processes
Chapter 17. Background Processing
Chapter 18. Debugging Scripts
Chapter 19. Expect + Tk = Expectk
Chapter 20. Extended Examples
Chapter 21. Expect, C, And C++
Chapter 22. Expect As Just Another Tcl Extension
Chapter 23. Miscellaneous