Re: [tcljava-user] Expect support

[Justin R. <ju...@ha...>]

In the Java space you have a few options for ssh/telnet scripting. The
cleanest implementation I've seen is enchanter (1).  While expectj (2)
is more compliant with actual expect library. I learned this while
investigating a expect solution for tcljava, and I also found that my
best option was to just write one myself which supports not only
expect in java but also the bindings needed for tcljava. The library
is called expect4j:

http://code.google.com/p/expect4j/

expect4j is aimed at supporting the functionality of the C-based
expect library, started by Don Libes, in java and tcljava.  The
library is written in java and uses a bootstrap class called
ExpectEmulation of load the relevant bindings into a tcljava Intrep.
The most important tcl functions have been implement, e.g. expect,
send, spawn. A full list of supported functions and global variables
are commented in ExpectEmulation.java.  I've successfully ported a
100K tcl script based on expect to tcljava, without any changes, by
just using expect4j.

One of the major limitations is that only ssh and telnet are supported
by the spawn command. This was done to limit interactions with
Runtime.exec(), and to keep the library completely in the java space.
This avoids the need for process control, forking, and PTYs.  On the
otherhand, the Expect4j class can be used for automating any
InputStream/OutputStream or Socket.  One of the unit tests shows how
to automate the "cmd /c net statistics Workstation" command on
Windows. For support of ssh/telnet, Jsch is used for ssh and
commons-net is used for telnet. The expect command can also match
against many different regexps/strings, unlike the other expect-like
libraries. ORO is used for the pattern matching.

The library is commented and unit tests are used to keep the library
in check is expect's original behavior. BUT there is little
documentation. For me, expect4j saved the day. If anyone is interested
in using this library I'd be happy to walk you through it. I'll use
that as motivation for writing the documentation.

Justin Ryan
Halfempty Industries

(1) http://code.google.com/p/enchanter/
(2) http://expectj.sourceforge.net/


On 11/8/07, Mo DeJong <mo...@mo...> wrote:
> Chet Vora wrote:
> > Hi
> >
> > Sorry if this is a newbie question but I was wondering if there's
> > support for Expect scripts. i.e can I run an expect script using the
> > Jacl interpreter ? We use expect primarily for network admin tasks
> > like login into devices/term servers via telnet/ssh and run commands.
> > Any useful pointers would be appreciated.
> >
> Hi Chet
>
> There is zero chance of expect working in Jacl. It depends on low level
> IO stuff that Java just
> does not support. You could use expect in Tcl Blend though.
>
> Mo DeJong
>
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