How to wrap a CLI program in Python (keeping the interactivity)?
command-line-interface, interactive, python, select, wrapper
Solution
Pexpect might be useful for you: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pexpect/
Description from the webpage: "Pexpect is a Python module for spawning child applications; controlling them; and responding to expected patterns in their output. Pexpect can be used for automating interactive applications such as ssh, ftp, passwd, telnet, etc. Pexpect is pure Python."
Problem
I'd like to write a wrapper for an interactive CLI Program (the Asterisk CLI). Basically, I need to keep the interaction with the CLI (including tab-completion) but I want to filter the output of Asterisk, in order to show only lines matching a given pattern. I tried a select() based approach, using popen.popen4 and putting asterisk stdout_and_stderr and sys.stdin in the read_fs, but it sort of didn't work. Can anyone give some good pointers to me? Thanks a lot, Andrea