Being somewhat of a scripting and automation “pundit”, I try to automate any and everything which I have to do on a regular basis. One limitation with this, however, is if a certain program requires keyboard and/or mouse events to continue, it really cannot be scripted using command line batch scripts. Of course, that is until I found AutoIt.

AutoIt is a free “scripting language” which lets you manipulate keyboard and mouse events. You can write up a script to open a program, run a certain operation and then close. This script can then be run from the command line (hence automated) via AutoIt’s command line utility.

Of course, using this tool requires you to learn the scripting language, but the payoff is huge as virtually anything can be scripted.