Win32 control

gaspodethewonderdog has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I've been toying with the idea of creating a webtv'ish toy from scratch that could incorporate a lot (if not all) of the features of a tivo as well and probably extend upon it a great deal.

Having a fairly good deal of experience with perl, but a lack of experience with perl on a windows system I need to know what if any options there are for controlling programs through perl. I know in C/C++ I'd probably try and latch into a program through OCX or similar controls and I know perl offers this kind of fuctionality.

Assuming this isn't a valid option (or just that I can't figure it out) in what other ways are there that I could control a program. Does perl allow for macro type control over programs.

On the other hand maybe I should just stick with linux and see if I can find an mpeg4 software compression program and see if there isn't the divx :) codec for linux.

Comment on Win32 control

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Re: Win32 control by Fastolfe (Vicar) on Oct 02, 2000 at 18:41 UTC
I don't know of any Perl facilities to actually do "user simulation" type of remote control, but many applications have OLE interfaces that allow other applications to take advantage of its services. Most Office applications, for example, have extensive OLE interfaces that you can use for automation. See Win32::OLE (and the same from CPAN).	[reply]
(tye)Re: Win32 control by tye (Sage) on Oct 02, 2000 at 20:54 UTC
For scripting Win32 GUI tasks, you might try Win32::ActAcc combined with Win32::GuiTest -- I haven't used them but the announcement for Win32::ActAcc seemed promising. I've used Win32::Setupsup for this type of stuff and rolled my own stuff, neither of which was polished enough for my taste. - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")	[reply]
Re: Win32 control by OzzyOsbourne (Chaplain) on Oct 02, 2000 at 20:00 UTC
The win32 module would be worth a look...	[reply]
Re: Win32 control by chromatic (Archbishop) on Oct 03, 2000 at 23:54 UTC
Two modules I just learned about today are Win32::Setupsup, which has the handy method SendKeys() (send arbitrary keystrokes to any window on the desktop) and Win32Guitest. (Dunno if that one's on CPAN or not.) You'll certainly want to visit Jenda Krynicky's archive for all of the GUI goodness. (okay, I read about them in a book. I don't even HAVE Windows.)	[reply]