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Expect used to be one of the "big" tools at one point. O'Reilly books written about it and so on. But then it went to obscurity. Kind of strange.

• mhitza 2y ago
  It's a rare thing nowadays to find a terminal command that is interactive and doesn't provide alternative flags for batch processing. Expect would still be useful for someone scripting a debugger (for example), but Tcl falls under the close to isoteric language nowadays and it takes less time to just repeat the commands in a readline capable interactive program than find just the right way to script it. Last time I've tried to use expect was when I attempted to build a Tk frontend to the Haskell GHCi debugger (similar to the DDD application), but I got tripped up, from vague memory, on terminal ansi codes, and random lock ups I couldn't pinpoint.
  • orev 2y ago
    Some tools like ssh and gpg go out of their way to prevent easy use via command line flags. They often have a good reason for doing this, but there are also sometimes good reasons where this type of protection causes problems. Since the implementers won’t budge on their stance, you need workarounds like expect.