If you need to automate tasks under Win32, there are two ways to go :

• Win32::OLE - as long as your target exposes an OLE2 interface, you can automate it form Windows Scripting host or Perl. All you need now is the documentation for the object model, which you obtain from your vendor. You get full control over the exposed features via this route.
• Win32::GuiTest - as long as you can see it, you can click on it. Automating this way is more to much more work, but you can also automate "hostile" programs that don't expose any OLE interface (maybe because they don't have one). Depending on how fancy the program is, the task gets harder, but if it uses standard widgets, automating these is relatively easy. You don't get nice error checking via exceptions though, you have to look for the error messages and windows yourself.

perl -MHTTP::Daemon -MHTTP::Response -MLWP::Simple -e ' ;    # The  
$d = new HTTP::Daemon and fork and getprint $d->url and exit;#spider
($c = $d->accept())->get_request(); $c->send_response( new   #in the
HTTP::Response(200,$_,$_,qq(Just another Perl hacker\n))); ' #  web
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