[Simh] tty magic(?) for talking to bootloaders?

Clem Cole clemc at ccc.com
Tue Sep 24 09:40:20 EDT 2019


Using it as you have is very cool; but as Lars mentioned, the other
important point is that using expect(1) framework outside of simh, means it
will work for other emulators and other things.

FYI: the idea of 'expect' was first part of the UNIX uucico program to do
the 'chat' portion of scripting needed to 'login' into a remote site.  By
1990,  Don Libes of NIST realized it was a pretty cool and general idea,
and broke it out to an external program (IIRC he used tcl under the covers
and parroted the code from uucico in his new tool): "expect: Curing Those
Uncontrollable Fits of Interactivity" by Don Libes, Proceedings of the
Summer 1990 USENIX Conference, Anaheim, California, June 11-15, 1990

I had not realized that Mark had brought the idea into simh as
sub-system/command until this exchange (which is cool.  A great idea, great
use - kudos!!).  In any case, now that you understand the idea for simh,
you can also use the general tool for other things.   There is even an ORA
book on writing expect(1) scripts.  FWIW: I have a few expect(1) scripts
for some of the more mundane things that need to be automated from time to
time.  But thanks to a real command system and tools like expect, it is
possible to automate them, which reminds me why I hate often hate GUIs
which can be tougher to automate.   FWIW: I'm pretty sure expect(1) has
been moved off of UNIX to some other platforms like VMS and DOS/Windows;
but I have not tried using it there.
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