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A comment on Don Libes' Expect: A Surprisingly Underappreciated Unix Automation Tool.

Re:Don Libes' Expect: A Surprisingly Underappreciated Unix A... by bxrxaxdx on Thursday December 08, 2016 @11:15AM (#13131289)
OMG I have been burned by this so many times. Expect itself is a cool piece of technology and works as well as anyone could hope. However, every time I've tried to use it for anything the solution ends up being super flaky. I think trying to automate text interfaces like this is just fundamentally unreliable.
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Re:Don Libes' Expect: A Surprisingly Underappreciated Unix A... by chriswarbo on Thursday December 08, 2016 @11:33AM (#13131481)
I think of it in the same way as screen scraping Web pages, or writing buffer-heavy Emacs Lisp:

- If there are alternatives, they'll usually be better

- It'll still be around when there are no alternatives

- Some tasks (e.g. "toggle foo mode") are inherently easier than others (e.g. "press up five times and hope that's enough")

- Some tasks need frequent maintenance and tweaking (e.g. as i/o formats change, program features are added/rearranged, shell environments are tweaked, etc.)

- Some tasks work so well that they're taken for granted for a decade, and it's only when you want to tweak some part that you remember how truly horrifying the implementation is ;)

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