UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I am currently wanting to automate the testing of a piece of software which runs in UNIX. The software is fairly basic, it has a menu, returns command line messages while operating, etc. I need to test it loading many different files which are all well organized and then run various combinations of menu options.

Basically my question is what would be the best approach and language to implement this quickly and efficiently? I'd like to be able able to run the same test/script on all of the input files automatically. But even if I had to run a small script which inputs the files individually it would save me a lot of time.

Being able to log and make decisions based on output to the console is very important.

I'm sure the solution is pretty simple but I'm new to UNIX and Google didn't really provide anything too relevant. Any pointers and references that would help me solve this problem would be greatly appreciated.

Here's how I would normally approach something like this:

Do one test manually, recording every keystroke exactly the way I enter it until I exit the application.

Then, I would save all of these keystrokes in a file.
Then redirect the contents of that file into the application.
See if that works.

Typically, you can do this with any UNIX application that reads from stdin.
For example, with vi, you can do this:

Code:

vi some_file_nm << EOF
iHello, world. I am now entering text in vi.
how about that? ^[:wq
EOF

Thank you. That got me started on a lot of things.

However, a key component is to be able to act on different cases output to the console from the application. (i.e. if theres an error/crash or other interesting case, log it, then progress accordingly).

My ideal would be some sort of wrapper program which will let me load/design scripts for this and other apps and have the system run them, logging the atypical results among other data.

Of course the minimum viable would be individual scripts to be run 1 at a time. However due to the number/complexity of the files that need to be operated on this isn't a good solution.