Controlling an external program with Python

[Paul Duffin]

Donn Cave wrote:
> 
> The worst mess is that collection of hacks and tricks to open the
> slave terminal without security exposure and in a way that allows
> features like Berkeley job control to work correctly.  It's a mess
> because it's poorly documented and, at least in the case of security,
> it deals with gaps rather than features.  Someone will have to sort
> those out and incorporate them into a few platform-independent functions
> that cover the necessary ground without taking too much onto themselves -
> I mean like forkpty() takes too much on itself, in my opinion, to be
> something we would want at the C level.
> 
> The more we can steal, the better.  There's too much platform specific
> folklore in here to write a good C implementation from scratch with
> man pages.
> 

Which is exactly what Don Libes has done for Expect. If you are interested
maybe you should talk to him about a collaboration to extract the knowledge
out of Expect into a C library which both Tcl/Expect and Python can use.