Since you specifically mention Hyper Terminal, I'm guessing you are running some flavor of Microsoft Windows. That being said, you might want to check out Win32::SerialPort to programmatically interact with the serial port directly, rather than somehow remotely controlling Hyper Terminal

If you really really want to somehow automate interaction with Hyper Terminal (and that's a not so subtle hint that you probably don't), the canonical Perl module for mucking about with Windows applications is Win32::GuiTest.

I agree that Win32::SerialPort is the way to go, I have used it myself. The API is not simple and the docs are none too clear, though, so I made my own wrapper to make it simpler to use. In case it is of use to you, I am including below my wrapper class (called Win32::RS232Port) and some snippets from an application of mine that use it.

The Win32::RS232Port class:

Read more... (6 kB)

An example of using the Win32::RS232Port (The app uses the classic hashref-as-object OO style, which is why the serial port object is stored in $self->{serport}):

# open serial port, create instance of Win32::RS232Port object
$self->{serport} =  Win32::RS232Port->new($comport_name, handshake => 
+'rts', baudrate => 9600);
if (!defined $self->{serport}) { die "Could not open reference COM por
+t"; }

# manually set state of handshaking output lines:
$self->{serport}->rts_active(1);
$self->{serport}->dtr_active(1);

# transmit some data:
$self->{serport}->qtx("SYST:ERR?\r\n");

sub poll {
    # call this function regularly to check for received data and to p
+ass on any queued data for transmission
    my $self = shift;
    
    if ( defined $self->{serport} ) {
        # pass on any queued data for transmission
        $self->{serport}->poll_tx;
        
        # handle incoming data: here I'm just appending it to $self->{
+com_rxd} where it can be picked up by code that's interested.
        my $rx = $self->{serport}->rx_data;
        if ($rx ne q{}) {
            $self->{com_rxd} = q{} if !defined $self->{com_rxd};
            $self->{com_rxd} .= $rx;
        }
    }
}

sub wait_for_tx_done {
    my $self = shift;
    my $tstart = time;
    while (defined $self->{serport} && $self->{serport}->tx_pending) {
        $self->poll();
        die "Timeout on serial port transmission\n" if time > $tstart 
++ 10;
    }
}

# close the serial port
$self->{serport}->close();
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--

"Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science" - Agatha Heterodyne