Re^2: Suggestions for testing interactive CLI apps?

[webfiend]

IPC::Run looks quite nice and easy. It looks like the timeout from the module handles alarm-style behavior.

Actually, IPC::Run looked so nice and easy that I tried it out. My attempts to use it pleased me, so I wrote a little wrapper to hide some of the clutter.

package Test::CLI;
use Modern::Perl;
use IPC::Run qw(run timeout);
use Test::More;

use base qw(Exporter);

our @EXPORT_OK = qw( 
    run_output_is
);

our $TIMEOUT = 10; 

sub run_output_is {
    my ($expected, $command, $input, $diagnostic) = @_; 
    my ($out, $err);
    run $command, \$input, \$out, \$err, timeout($TIMEOUT);
    is $expected, $out, $diagnostic;
}

1;

That allowed for a nice simple script in my test code.

use Modern::Perl;
use Test::CLI qw(run_output_is);
use Test::More tests => 1;

my @command = qw(parrot code/example-01-06.pir);

my $in =<<INPUT
Brian
INPUT
;

my $expected =<<EXPECTED
Please enter your name: Brian
Hello, Brian!
EXPECTED
;

run_output_is $expected, \@command, $in;

So thanks for the suggestion! That worked quite nicely for my needs.