Expect for Not Yet Techies

"Computer Careers: Using a Program to Automate Your Use of Unix Tools"

by Richard Stooker, President Info Ring Press and author of Secrets of Changing to a Computer Career

Expect is a program for Unix systems that speeds up your work by automating interactive tools. Expect was started in 1990 by Don Libes and is integrated on top of the Tcl programming language.

If you've been to web sites and filled in forms chances are that you've been asked to at various points in the process to supply different information, such as passwords, etc. Expect automates this by already knowing the answer and giving it to the requesting program when asked.

It can automate ftp, passwords, rlogin and 100s of other such applications that take up a lot of your time with trivia. You can use it to write simple scripts that automate the necessary keystrokes to give the program what it wants.

Expect is named after the specific command in the program that waits for output from a program and is the very heart of this program.

Expect is actually the first widely used program based on the Tcl language. You can combine Expect with Tk, the Tcl toolkit for creating Windows GUIs (Graphic User Interfaces, or icons) to create the kind of point and click power that us Windows users are used to. The resulting program is called Expectk.

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