Don Libes is a computer scientist at NIST performing computer science research on interoperability. He works in the Manufacturing Systems Integration Division, which performs research on software integration methods, creating custom software that implements draft standards and serves as an interface to other components provided by separate vendors. Libes is responsible for numerous implementations of

STEP Step(s) or STEP may refer to: Common meanings * Stairs#Step, Steps, making a staircase * Walking * Dance move * Military step, or march ** Marching Arts Films and television * Steps (TV series), ''Steps'' (TV series), Hong Kong * Step (film), ' ...

, a family of

ISO ISO is the most common abbreviation for the International Organization for Standardization. ISO or Iso may also refer to: Business and finance * Iso (supermarket), a chain of Danish supermarkets incorporated into the SuperBest chain in 2007 * Iso ...

standards and draft standards for product management. He is the creator of the NIST Identifier Collaboration Service, a free service to allow collaborative management of unmanaged namespaces. Libes is also responsible for one of the earliest network-shared memory ports on

UNIX Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...

and the first port of

XINU Xinu Is Not Unix (Xinu, a recursive acronym), is an operating system for embedded systems, originally developed by Douglas Comer for educational use at Purdue University in the 1980s. The name is both recursive, and is ''Unix'' spelled backwards ...

on UNIX. Libes's book ''Obfuscated C Code and Other Mysteries'' explains the winning entries in the Obfuscated C Code Contest, as an educational tool. Libes is best known for

Expect Expect is an extension to the Tcl scripting language written by Don Libes. The program automates interactions with programs that expose a text terminal interface. Expect, originally written in 1990 for the Unix platform, has since become avail ...

, which is

public domain software Public-domain software is software that has been placed in the public domain, in other words, software for which there is absolutely no ownership such as copyright, trademark, or patent. Software in the public domain can be modified, distributed, ...

for automating and testing interactive applications such as

Telnet Telnet is an application protocol used on the Internet or local area network to provide a bidirectional interactive text-oriented communication facility using a virtual terminal connection. User data is interspersed in-band with Telnet contr ...

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and data ...

passwd passwd is a command on Unix, Plan 9, Inferno, and most Unix-like operating systems used to change a user's password. The password entered by the user is run through a key derivation function to create a hashed version of the new password, wh ...

and hundreds of other programs that have no internal control language (or too limited of a control language) of their own. Libes also developed Expectk, which glues Expect to Tk thereby allowing a character-graphic or line-oriented program to be entirely hidden with a modern graphical user interface. Expect has been successively ported to Perl(expect.pm), Python(pexpect) and Java(expect4j): the aforementioned ports are all open source and are as such subject to caution concerning their conformity to Libes' original software. Massive network automation with the original language or these variants is patent within many ISP's autonomous systems worldwide - the tectonic plates of the Internet, and also within large national and international corporate networks.

Publications

;Books: *Don Libes and Sandy Ressler, ''Life With UNIX: A Guide For Everyone'', Prentice-Hall, 1989. . *Don Libes, ''Obfuscated C and Other Mysteries'', Wiley, 1993. . *Don Libes, ''Exploring Expect: A Tcl-based Toolkit for Automating Interactive Programs'', O'Reilly, 1995. .

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Libes, Don American computer scientists Computer systems researchers Living people Year of birth missing (living people)