Shell Programming and Scripting

OK, let me phrase it differently: can that program be run from the command line giving the results desired? If yes, I could imagine ways to automate that, if no you may be stuck with that GUI and have to look for key or gesture loggers within that GUI.

The program could be run from the command line if the user knew what to enter as the GUI returns, for instance - the GUI user could push an 'ok' button while the command line user would have to type in 'ok'. So, effectively, we would have to get those "returns", whether it be choices of field or simply a 'yes', 'no', or 'ok', from the user log file into a ksh script and have the program react appropriately to the input. Make more sense?

Exactly, that was the idea. Collect a bunch of commonly run reports with their parameters, put those into a menu script and have the users select the menu item they want for that day.

But it would make more sense to capture the output of the gui than the keystrokes it needs to generate that output. Then you wouldn't need the GUI every time. Probably much easier to capture the output than the keystrokes in any case.

We can capture the output from the GUI (which is the input to the program, I suppose). This info is written to a file; problem is, since this GUI is just a passthru to Unix, what ends up in the file is every bit of the GUI code, from beginning to end. So whatever the user sees in the GUI is, in the background, written on the command line "behind" it. So, if I look at that file afterward, I see everything from "Welcome" to the selections made to the grids that are loaded etc. So you see, it's not simply their selections that I can pass back. I would have to parse them out of the file, which might take some work, but then I'm thinking I could pass them to the script and add a button to the GUI that would essentially run the program using the values in the script. The WinFAST GUI is all client-side and all they can see and use. It's something I had never heard of until I started working here. More info gowinfast.com.

It's going to be way more straightforward to parse a file than hijack and replay an xterm. Terminals are built to avoid that kind of snooping. If you show us sample input and output (with confidential stuff blanked of course) we can probably show you how.

Can't you see the program parameters like when using the -f option to ps, or in the /proc file system?