shells and bells

[thaven at world.std.com (Timothy W Haven)]

If you are going to learn expect (or use it for a simple task),
look at autoexpect. I just learned about this from a co-worker.
I haven't used it myself, but it looks great.

autoexpect  -  generate  an  Expect script from watching a session

Timothy

On Thu, May 04, 2000 at 09:38:20AM -0400, Ron Peterson wrote:
> John Chambers wrote:
> > 
> > Derek Martin wrote:
> >          On Wed, 3 May 2000, Tewksbury, Chuck wrote:
> > 
> >          > 1- should I use 'bash' or 'csh'?  A computer wiz friend once recommended
> >          > csh.... not sure i notice the difference or what commands are available in
> >          > csh that arent in bash
> > 
> >          It's really a matter of preference, but if your goal is to learn system
> >          administration, or if you want to write shell scripts, then I'd highly
> >          recommend you choose bash.  It's mostly Bourne shell compatible and
> >          largely korn shell compatible (though there are numerous ksh features
> >          missing).
> > 
> >          This is preferable because a) all boot scripts are written in bourne shell
> >          (or bash on Linux systems) and bourne shell is a better scripting language
> >          than C shell.  There are some things that you simply CAN'T do with C shell
> >          that are quite trivial with bourne (and bash).
> > 
> > Though if you are doing anything nontrivial, you  are  almost  always
> > better off with perl, tcl or python as your "scripting" language. And
> > perl in particular has become standard on just about all unix systems
> > since it took over the Web.
> 
> I'd also mention expect.  Expect does something none of the
> aforementioned scripting tools does - it lets you write scripts that
> interact with other interactive programs.  For example, you could use
> expect to establish a secure shell (ssh) connection to other machines,
> then, I dunno, update user configuration information for /etc/passwd,
> /etc/group, sendmail, samba, apache user authentication, etc.  All from
> one remote location, all securely.
> 
> You can get other tools to let you do centralized administration, but if
> you learn how to do this yourself, you won't be limited to what the
> available tools let you do.
> 
> Of course, it's good for other things besides administration, too.  You
> could use it to simplify ftp downloads, etc.
> 
> I'd recommend getting the book.  The expect web site
> (http://expect.nist.gov/) doesn't offer up a lot of online
> documentation.  They want you to buy the book.  Personally, I think
> selling books is a good way for free software adherents to pay the rent
> (also good motivation for hackers to write documentation).  Don't
> begrudge them the right to make a buck, and go visit O'Reilly.
> 
> I'm not a big fan of tcl syntax (expect is based on tcl), but since this
> is the only tool around that does what it does, it well worth a look
> see.
> 
> -Ron-
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