Expect adds many extensions to the Tcl scripting language which simplify scripting interactive applications controlling such hard-to-interact programs as, for example, telnet, ftp, passwd, fsck, rlogin, tip, ssh, and others.

Expect/tcl can run a GUI interface or run from the command line. Since Tcl is a full featured programming language, Expect can easily interact with databases, webservers, etc. with intuitive, powerful, and easy-to-anticipate processing.

Expect is in the public domain. There is full support for Linux and Windows.

Links

• Overview and history website
• Support and download website
• FAQs website
• Tcl tag info page on Stack Overflow
• Wikipedia page

Common "gotcha"s

Take careful note of this caveat from the expect(1) man page:

Expect takes a rather liberal view of scoping. In particular, variables read by commands specific to the Expect program will be sought first from the local scope, and if not found, in the global scope. For example, this obviates the need to place "global timeout" in every procedure you write that uses expect. On the other hand, variables written are always in the local scope (unless a "global" command has been issued). The most common problem this causes is when spawn is executed in a procedure. Outside the procedure, spawn_id no longer exists, so the spawned process is no longer accessible simply because of scoping. Add a "global spawn_id" to such a procedure.

Debugging Mode

The expect program has a debugging mode where it prints out exactly what it receives from the spawned programs and what it is looking for. This can be extremely helpful when working out why your scripts are not working! Enable it by passing the -d option on the command line.