Terminal Emulation for Automation and Testing of Character-Graphic Programs: A Code Walkthrough

This paper describes a technique that allows automation and testing of charactergraphic programs using existing public-domain tools. Specifically, Tcl, Tk, and Expect are augmented with a terminal emulator in order to build a screen representation in memory. This screen can be queried in a high-level way and the interaction can be further controlled based on the screen representation. One immediate use of this is to build a test suite for automating standards conformance of all of the interactive programs in POSIX 1003.2 (Interactive Shells and Utilities). This technique is portable and inexpensive. All the software described in this paper is free or in the public domain. This paper assumes a thorough understanding of Expect, Tcl, and Tk.