Wow tjormola, you must have worked with some pretty nifty versions of *nix if you have always had an environment with built in and reliable text-to-speech and system wide scripting capablity for gui applications! ;-) To me the fact that I can do these things on a Mac isn't a surprise since the the Mac OS has had these capabilies for year, but that fact that I can do it while logged in remotely with the power of sudo still causes me to smile and giggle!

Of course I meant to say, "the Mac OS has had these capabilities for years".

Somehow Applescript seems so much more powerful than xmesg. I am sure that an expert with gnome or kde (or a Tk guru using wish) could accomplish many of the same tricks under X, but clearly that is no where near as easy to do and requires that the 'victim' have the appropriate windowing environment in place.

It does make me realize that I need to look around and see if the venerable xroaches has been cloned for OSX though!