From Tcl/Tk to Python

The whitespace madness with my Expect Tcl/Tk script was getting unbearable. Oh, wait, you don't know what the whitespace madness was. Basically, it is very difficult to propagate parameters containing whitespaces to a remote program that is called from SSH when you already call SSH from another script. You have to get the script to 'double quote' the arguments, and I was just not being able to do this with Expect Tcl/Tk. It kept adding curly braces {} to my quoted arguments, making them unusable.

Admittedly this was due to sheer incompetence since I'm not very acquainted with Expect nor Tcl/Tk, but I had to get things working somehow. After scavenging poorly-organized documentation and reading articles for half a day, I decided to put an end to this - I don't have the time to become a skilled Expect Tcl/Tk programmer right now.

So I tried Pexpect, a simplified Expect for Python. Well, it worked great! In fact, Python is great.

Took me a while to get my code working, though, since my Python is kind of rusty. You can feel sorry for me by taking a look at the code I wrote. It's there for everyone to see, in my CVS.

See ya!