Seeking wisdom on automating GUI installs on Windows

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

Hello PerlMonks,

I am seeking general direction to good study material for learning how to use Perl to automate third party applications that require mouse and keyboard control. Unfortunately, there is not a silent install option available for the apps I need to install many times. Alternate, ideas are also welcome.

Whatever you can offer will be appreciated.

Thanks,
Malus

Comment on Seeking wisdom on automating GUI installs on Windows

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Re: Seeking wisdom on automating GUI installs on Windows by kennethk (Abbot) on Aug 27, 2009 at 16:54 UTC
Check out Win32::GuiTest and Win32::GuiTest::Examples for automating mouse and keyboard. If you go this route, you'll probably want to download from sourceforge to avoid having to build the modules.	[reply]
Re: Seeking wisdom on automating GUI installs on Windows by Sinistral (Monsignor) on Aug 27, 2009 at 17:57 UTC
I hesitate to provide a non-Perl solution here on PerlMonks, but people at work have had fantastic success with AutoIt. You can record actions via GUI, but you can also program using its own scripting language. Even better, you can create executables from AutoIt scripts. If you're really wanting to use Perl for this, then I'll give a big ditto for Win32::GUI and Win32::GuiTest	[reply]