To be fair, when you are using Perl, you are using Larry's (and quite a few other talented folks) code :)
Expect is *very* complicated, if you are a Unix platform and need to have perl talk with an interactive application, there is no shame in using it. If you are dealing with non-interactive processes (i.e. running at the end of a shell pipe), yeah, this would be a good thing to do yourself.
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