[Simh] How do we test the emulators?

[Vince Mulhollon]

On Tue, Sep 18, 2007 at 03:19:08PM -0500, Hittner, David T. wrote:
> What may have to happen is someone might have to write a framwork that
> starts up the simulator in a subprocess and monitors the subprocess(es),
> and then gracefully shuts the simulator down after all the tests pass.

Sounds like the definition of "expect".

expect.nist.gov
or
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expect

It's 20 years old, very well documented, and well debugged.
It's trivial to install on any usable operating system, just
apt-get install expect
or as appropriate for your distribution.
I understand they have ports for legacy OS's like windows, etc.

It would be a shame to reinvent expect in Perl.

For a couple years, I've been planning to write expect scripts
to do full OS installs in simh, but I have the common problem of too
many other things to do.  It would be fairly obvious to script up
the running of various diagnostics and benchmarks instead.