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

Published

Author(s)

Don E. Libes

Abstract

This paper describes a technique that allows automation and testing of charactergraphic programs using existing public-domain tools. Specially, Tcl, Tk and expect are augmented with a terminal emulator in order to build a screen representation im memory. This screen can be queried in highlevel 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 POSTIX 1003.2 (Interactive Shells and Utilities). This technique is portable and inexpensive. All the software described in this paper is free of in the public domain. This paper assumes a thorough understanding of Except, Tcl and Tk.
Proceedings Title
Proceedings of The 21st Annual Trenton Computer Festival (TCF '96)
Conference Dates
April 21-22, 1996
Conference Location
Trenton, NJ

Keywords

conformance testing, expect, interaction automation, POSTIX 1003.2 regression testing, Tcl, Tk, X Window System

Citation

Libes, D. (1996), Terminal Emulation for Automation and Testing of Character-Graphic Programs: A Code Walkthrough, Proceedings of The 21st Annual Trenton Computer Festival (TCF '96), Trenton, NJ, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=821286 (Accessed April 24, 2024)
Created April 1, 1996, Updated February 17, 2017