Comment by repairisntcheap

One of my most fond programming experiences was using tcl/expect to create a custom web interface for an IBM Tivoli tape library. The stock web interface was too expensive for a college with a few thousand users, and didn't provide adequate access control to allow our users to restore ONLY their own files.

Yes, wrapping a telnet session is a hack... But it was a hell of a hack that did everything we needed!