> But I have done a quite a bit of scripting in MS Windows 
> using vbscript,
> sendkeys, sidekick, etc... With various degrees of success. 

But vbscript is not 'the' scripting language of windows applications, it
just happens to be the inside engine of most Microsoft apps. It won't do
you much good to automate a task using let's say Firefox.

One problem I had is that I create invoices from an administration
program (I wrote that myself, in Python), and I want to print them in a
nice format. I used to have a letterhead in Word, print that on a stack
of paper, the invoice itself was in html, and I used IE to print that (I
could not get Firefox to print by default without any headers or
footers). I had to do that by hand: open the file, print print print (I
need 3 copies), open next file, etc. I switched to generating rtf, so I
can have the letterhead and invoice proper in one file, but I would
still have to open Word, print print print, open next file etc. I could
not find a Word command line option to cause it to open the file, print
it, and quit. I recently learned that this can easily be done by
specifying a macro to run. That macro still can't print 3 times (I dunno
why, it simply does not work), but I can start Word with the macro 3
times, no problem.

The point of this is that Word is a typical GUI program, and with its
macro/scription facility it is not too closed. But to do something basic
(print a file) in an automated way (what else are computers for!) I must
first get the idea that this can (only) be done by a startup macro, and
I have to learn the language for that macro. (OK, google helps a lot for
both) A decent CLI application would provide a documented way to do this
from the command line...

Note that this is a GUI issue, not a Microsoft issue. Firefox is even
worse that IE in this tiny aspect.

> And CLI scripting in Windows systems is very much alive and well, so
> wouldn't it be nice to have a GUI of the command line 
> utilities? E.g. the
> standard Win32 command line stuff like SORT, DIR, etc... 
> Should have GUI
> interfaces accessible from the command line as menu pull 
> downs or popups.

I realy don't see any use for that

> I've always loved that quote about Unix being very friendly, but very
> selective about it's friends. Perl seems that way to me as well.

not a friend of mine. Python has eaten it alive.

Wouter van Ooijen

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