Hello Noah,

first of all I would like to thank you for pexpect -- it is great and I
use it all the time.

A while back I also wrote something in the same functional space: kdesu.
This also contained a small helper in C++ for interfacing with a
command-line program through a PTY.

When I read the description of the "echo bug" on your page, and saw how
you wanted to solve this (by issueing a delay), I remembered that there
is another way to solve this and this is how I implemented it in kdesu.
You could add a method to pexpect to i) report on the echo status of the
PTY, and 2) wait for echo to become off. The latter may require a
polling loop as I think there is no wait to wait for it (but I am not sure).

The SSH problem you describe could then be solved like this:

    child.expect ('[pP]assword:')
    child.wait_echo_off()
    child.sendline (my_password)

I think this is guaranteed to be race-free and in general feels a bit
cleaner that issueing a delay.

Hope this was useful. In any case keep up the great work with pexpect!

Regards,
Geert Jansen