Re: Begin WG Last Call: draft-ietf-netconf-prot-04

[Simon Leinen <simon@limmat.switch.ch>]

Dan,

thanks for your review.  Here's a quick response to one of your
questions:

> 4. Section 7.5 - what is an 'Expect script'?

From http://expect.nist.gov/ -

    "Expect is a tool for automating interactive applications such as
    telnet, ftp, passwd, fsck, rlogin, tip, etc. Expect really makes
    this stuff trivial. Expect is also useful for testing these same
    applications. [...]"

Operators use it a lot to script interactions with devices that have a
CLI (command line interface).  Expect scripts are often the basis for
specialized higher-layer tools such as configuration control systems
(see RANCID, http://www.shrubbery.net/rancid/).

The original "Expect" was written in Tcl, but there are many variants
of the idea, such as the Chat.pl, Comm.pl, and Expect.pm modules for
Perl.

So when we talk about "Expect scripts", we usually refer to all
scripted usage of the CLI.  Which should gradually be replaced by
scripts that use NETCONF.
-- 
Simon.


--
to unsubscribe send a message to netconf-request@ops.ietf.org with
the word 'unsubscribe' in a single line as the message text body.
archive: <http://ops.ietf.org/lists/netconf/>