A note from the father of Perl Expect, Roland Giersig (roland@giersig.org).

Some guy was asking about a Solaris peculiarity using telnet under expect,
and Roland replied.
  > What comes to mind is to circumvent ptys completely. Have you considered
  >  using Net::Telnet instead of spawning a telnet program?

The guy then answered,
> That sounds like a great idea.
> 
> I just took a look at the Expect & Net::Telnet man pages ... and frankly
> it isn't yet clear to me how to hook to two together. That is ... what
> method(s) do I use instead of $exp->spawn('telnet foo')
> 
> Any pointers would be appreciated

To which Roland replied,
>  You can Expect-ize a Net::Telnet object by doing something like
>
> $Expect::Exp_Internal = 1;
>
> $t = new Net::Telnet();
> $t->open($host);
> $t->login($name, $pass);
>
> $e = Expect->exp_init($t);
>
> print $e "ls\r";
>
> $e->expect(60, $prompt);

>
> though you may want to just look at the Net::Telnet native routines
> such as 'cmd' and the like.
>
> There are basically two schools of thought. One is "use Net::Telnet
> because it's the tool made for the protocol" (telnet in this case). It will
> be more portable, and support protocol-specific functionality better as a
> general rule. The other is "use Expect because you are lazy". Handy if you
> are already familiar with it and don't need portability. The API is always
> the same.
>
> Both schools of thought have their advantages, well at least IMO.
> There's also a combo of the two, like you suggest, which is sort of a best
> of both worlds approach where you let the protocol specific lib do the
> dirty work, then use Expect afterwards.