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Comment by repairisntcheap | Hacker News Reader

repairisntcheap·

One of my most fond programming experiences was using tcl/expect to create a custom web interface for an IBM Tivoli tape library. The stock web interface was too expensive for a college with a few thousand users, and didn't provide adequate access control to allow our users to restore ONLY their own files.

Yes, wrapping a telnet session is a hack... But it was a hell of a hack that did everything we needed!

I'd still use expect instead of docker/ansible/salt ... if I could get away with it.

Those aren't alternatives; you'd create a Docker image with expect installed, for example.

Yeah ... but I don't want to touch Kubernetes. Kubernetes doesn't spark joy.

Wrapping expect in an Ansible playbook is really useful though.

There is an expect module included in Ansible.

Backed by pexpect of course.

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