Expect for Windows

I've just noticed on the Activestate site that "the ActiveTcl distribution now includes Expect for Windows. A license is no longer required ....". At face value, that looks like excellent news!

One of the big uses of Tcl and Tcl/Tk is in the automation of processes / programs that are designed to work from the command line and don't have an easy interface for other automata to use them. For example, if you run a regular ssh or telnet session every day, you can automate it with relative ease through Expect, where you choreograph the session in a series of "I say this" and "you say that" type statements.

Expect was written originally for Unix and works well on Linux and OS X. Up until a year or two back, only older and somewhat unsupported / unstable releases were available on Windows due, I understand, to the underlying operating system making it quite an issue to implement the multiprocess environment expect requires. Then Activestate brought out a commercial, license-only expect extenstion to ActiveTcl. This has always felt a bit - unfortunate - that a piece of software that started as Open Source became commercial-only in this guise and I'll be off to look at the licensing agreement when I get the odd spare moment to see if it's now - as I hope - free at the point of distribution and on a license under which that distribution can be used in perpituity. With a confirmation of the latter, you'll find me grinning from ear to ear!

Added, 10th September ... I AM grinning from ear to ear. I had a chance to download and test Expect for Windows and it ran nicely, without any problems. See full source code of my example

(written 2005-09-04 06:53:35)

Associated topics are indexed under

T211 - Tcl/Tk - What is Expect? Why use it?
T242 - Tcl/Tk - More on Expect

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