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by falsedan
3292 days ago
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I'm familiar with expect, but I don't have any modems anymore which require AT commands to be sent to it with precise timing. It seems like you are describing what it is, not what it should be used for (which is what I can't figure out, based on my knowledge of other tools). |
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To answer your question with specifics, you could use something like this to:
- Start services, and then do something (maybe alert, maybe make a change and try again) if it failed.
- Make configuration changes across several files and check the results of the changes (i.e. did things continue to work after the change).
- Check for updates in version control and then optionally deploy them based on the results (e.g. if there's a new tagged version).
- Interact with some API periodically, and do something if results change.
- Tons of things I don't do, but somebody else might. It's kind of an IFTTT (If This Then That) for the command line (which is maybe obvious, since I guess IFTTT was an implementation of expect for the web, in the long tradition of "take a UNIX utility and make a version for the web"). It isn't for any one thing; it's for whatever thing you want to programmatically do with stuff that maybe wasn't meant to be programmatically worked with (or maybe just doesn't have a Python API).
All of this can be done with any reasonably competent programming language, including Python (I use Perl with some tiny custom libs or bash with boilerplate, usually). This removes a bit of code. Maybe only a little code is removed, maybe a lot. It depends on what you're doing, and how well the commands or APIs you're calling lend themselves to being called from a shell or Python or whatever.
Expect was a tool to make working with tools that maybe didn't intend to be called from shell (or Tcl, or C, for that matter) programs work better when called from programs. There have always been many ways to do it. If this doesn't fit the way you think or the tools you use don't need it, there may be better ways for you to accomplish similar tasks. But, it's not a crazy idea.