Terminal Emulation for Automation and Testing of Character-Graphic Programs: A Code Walkthrough
Don Libes · 1996
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. Keywords: Conformance Testing; Expect; Interaction Automation; POSIX 1003.2; Regression Testing; Tcl; Tk; X Window System Introduction Most character-graphic programs are interactive and provide no means for non-interactive control. This is not sur...