Has anyone used Expect for Windows? Any good experiences to share?
I'm wondering if it's something I should take the time to learn and use.
Expect – A tool for automating interactive applications
11–20 of 52 posts
Re: Expect – A tool for automating interactive applications
#12Wow, a blast from the past. I still have some expect tools I wrote long ago that I use and maintain to this day. Not so much new stuff since scripting languages have gotten better at doing what expect does -- often calling their modules "expect" and using the exact same syntax.
I once wrote a webserver in Expect. No, it's not a good language for writing a webserver.
Re: Expect – A tool for automating interactive applications
#13It's very frustrating to see something like this that claims to be very useful, but shows no examples on the page.
>Expect is a tool for automating interactive applications such as telnet, ftp, passwd, fsck, rlogin, tip, etc. Expect really makes this stuff trivial.
How?
>Expect can make easy all sorts of tasks that are prohibitively difficult with anything else. You will find that Expect is an absolutely invaluable tool - using it, you will be able to automate tasks that you've never even thought of before - and you'll be able to do this automation quickly and easily.
HOW?
Ah, examples... >http://expect.sourceforge.net/#examples
It's just a giant README. This is frustrating.
Re: Expect – A tool for automating interactive applications
#14For python, there's pexpect: http://pexpect.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
Re: Expect – A tool for automating interactive applications
#15Here is an alternative I use. http://empty.sourceforge.net/
Re: Expect – A tool for automating interactive applications
#16For python, there's pexpect: http://pexpect.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
I used pexpect as a base technology for ShutIt:
http://ianmiell.github.io/shutit/
it really is 95% of tcl's expect functionality, much easier to debug and understand. I'm grateful it exists, and it's much under-used I think.
Re: Expect – A tool for automating interactive applications
#17Oh expect. I've got a crappy little script I wrote when I was a sysadmin at Ticketmaster used to change a lot of our out of band management card passwords:
http://www.digitalprognosis.com/opensource/scripts/change_pa...
It might be useful to someone else.
Re: Expect – A tool for automating interactive applications
#18We used Expect recently to automate iOS runtime hacking (ssh to jailbroken iOS device, run cycript to inject code, profit). One of those old Unix tools (built on tcl) that's very handy for automation.
Re: Expect – A tool for automating interactive applications
#19For python, there's pexpect: http://pexpect.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
I used pexpect as a base technology for ShutIt: http://ianmiell.github.io/shutit/ it really is 95% of tcl's expect functionality, much easier to debug and understand. I'm grateful it exists, and it's much under-used I think.
Nice.
I have a somewhat similar tool but it doesn't do much besides check for password expiry and do password changes.
It uses pexpect but also multiprocessing and multiprocessing.Queue. I built most of it before we started using Ansible at work, but it is still useful in those places where Ansible is clumsy.
Re: Expect – A tool for automating interactive applications
#20For python, there's pexpect: http://pexpect.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
I used pexpect as a base technology for ShutIt: http://ianmiell.github.io/shutit/ it really is 95% of tcl's expect functionality, much easier to debug and understand. I'm grateful it exists, and it's much under-used I think.
It was great to see ShutIt during the last Docker London!