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What happened to Expect?
by Jeff Hobbs

Jeff Hobbs, January 31, 2006

Not too long ago, there was a binary distributed with ActiveTcl and the Tcl Dev Kit called expect.  It allowed one to write Tcl scripts that made use of a collection of functions that were extremely handy for automating tasks which weren't otherwise easy to automate.  A good example of this kind of task is running software test suites automatically.

In recent versions of Tcl and the TDK, the executable is nowhere to be found.  Naturally, this brings up the question of where it went.

Quite simply, it underwent a bit of a transformation.  Rather than being a separate executable, it is now a library that you can use in Tcl scripts, and execute the script with tclsh or wish.  Simply include the line:

package require Expect

In your Tcl source file before using expect or exp_send and related commands, and your script will work when run with tclsh or wish.

Read more about Tcl Expect for Windows here.

Tags: expect
Category: tcl
About the Author: RSS

Jeff Hobbs is our VP, Engineering and oversees all ActiveState product development including our cloud solutions. Though he’s responsible for leading and fostering our talented development team, Jeff is a coder at heart! He is passionate about technologies that just work, making the lives of developers easier. His current obsession is making Stackato the best private PaaS platform for developers: using any language, any infrastructure, and leveraging open source - so that applications just deploy and scale in any cloud.

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Comments

2 comments for What happened to Expect?
Permalink

You may want to check the editing on this page as there are several mistakes. The first paragraph is a duplicate of the first line of the next paragraph.

http://www.activestate.com/blog/2006/01/what-happened-expect

Permalink

You can also check out this page on Expect:

http://www.activestate.com/activetcl/expect

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