Pexpect For Linux

Pexpect (also known as python-pexpect) is an open source and completely free library software implemented in Python as an Expect-like module for spawning child applications, controlling them, as well as to respond to expected patterns, in their output.

Pexpect provides an easy-to-use command-line interface (CLI) that lets users to effortlessly perform various simple tasks. It includes a VT100/ANSI terminal screen scraping module.

The Pexpect module can be used by automating interactive programs like FTP, SSH, or Telnet clients, as well as the passwd command, and others, to automate setup scripts and for automated software testing.

You will also be able to use this Python module to duplicate software package installations on several servers. For more detailed documentation and usage examples, do not hesitate to view the project’s homepage (see link at the end of this description).

When compared with the Expect module, we can notice that Pexpect doesn’t rely on Expect or TCL, and it does not depends on compiled C extensions. It is fully portable on any operating system where the pty Python module is available.

Installing and using the Pexpect program in your GNU/Linux distribution is quite easy, as you will only have to run the ‘pip install pexpect’ command in a terminal emulator, considering the fact that the pip (python-pip) utility is already installed.

As an alternative, the latest version of Pexpect can be installed by downloading the source package from Softpedia, using the dedicated download section above, saving the archive on your computer, extracting its contents, opening a terminal emulator, navigating to the location of the extracted archive files (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/pexpect-3.3) and running the ‘sudo python setup.py install’ command as root (system administrator).