Sorry, I still don't understand: Do you have text files on your desktop that need editing, or do you need to edit the files on the Cisco device?

I had a system once where I needed to automatically make a change on a Cisco device during a failure state. I had a linux box attached to the Cisco device via serial cable. I used minicom to talk to the Cisco device. I wrote a perl script with expect that fired up minicom and talked to the Cisco. If it would be helpful, I could probably fish it out and you could take a look at it.

-Pileofrogs