Version 14 of Many people who think they need Expect do not need Expect

Updated 2006-07-03 14:18:55

[ Expect is wonderful. Its role in the past was quite large.]

[Now there are often strictly superior approaches for many problems that would have been solved in the past with Expect.]

[On another hand, Expect still has many uses that programmers do not know.]


So, here are examples of more modern ways to do things that once would have been best with Expect:


"Others have given you answers to your immediate problem. I would suggest you look at cfengine as a longer term solution. The problem you described could have been trivially solved by adding a few lines to the cfengine master files at the policy server. On the next scheduled run, all the servers would have downloaded the new config file, seen the new instructions and implemented them." [Rework, explain, ...]


Category Expect