5.12.1. Contents of Expect

The Expect package provides a program that performs programmed dialogue with other interactive programs.

Installed program: expect

Installed library: libexpect5.39.a

5.12.2.

5.12.3. Expect Installation Dependencies

Expect depends on: Bash, Binutils, Coreutils, Diffutils, GCC, Glibc, Grep, Make, Sed, Tcl.

5.12.4.

5.12.5. Installation of Expect

First apply a patch:

patch -Np1 -i ../expect-5.39.0-spawn.patch

This fixes a bug in Expect that can result in bogus failures during the GCC test suite run.

Now prepare Expect for compilation:

./configure --prefix=/tools --with-tcl=/tools/lib --with-x=no

The meaning of the configure options:

• --with-tcl=/tools/lib: This ensures that the configure script finds the Tcl installation in our temporary tools location. We don't want it to find an existing one that may possibly reside on the host system.

• --with-x=no: This tells the configure script not to search for Tk (the Tcl GUI component) or the X Window System libraries, both of which may possibly reside on the host system.

Build the package:

make

This package has a test suite available which can perform a number of checks to ensure it built correctly. However, the Expect test suite here in Chapter 5 is known to experience failures under certain host conditions that are not fully understood. Therefore, test suite failures here are not surprising, but are not considered critical. Should you choose to run the test suite, the following command will do so:

make test

And install:

make SCRIPTS="" install

The meaning of the make parameter:

• SCRIPTS="": This prevents installation of the supplementary expect scripts which are not needed.

You can now remove the source directories of both Tcl and Expect.