GnuCash command line

[Austin Bingham]

I've been using GnuCash for quite a while now, and I have some ideas for
additions that I think might be very useful and very simple. I wanted to
make sure these features weren't already available (I haven't looked real
hard, to be honest). If these features are not yet available, I wanted to
find out from folks with experience on this codebase how they might best be
implemented (i.e. through scripting, more C, or whatever).

Basically, I'd like a way to add simple transactions to my accounts from the
command line. I find that 90% of my interaction with GnuCash is the simple
recording of withdrawals from and deposits to my checking account. I imagine
many GC users have the same usage patterns. It's a little bulky, IMO, to
fire up the full GC GUI just to record simple transactions, so I'd like a
command line way to it, perhaps using a perl interface to the data or
something. I am picturing wholesale reuse of the code that already does
transaction recording, just called from a small little bit of code rather
than the GUI callbacks.

Again, this functionality might already exist, and if so, that's fantastic.
If not, are there any ideas on a "good" way to implement this? Where should
I look to see how it's already done? Thanks, and keep up the good work!
GnuCash is a fantastic piece of work :)

Austin Bingham
Laboratory for Intelligent Processes and Systems
University of Texas at Austin
abingham@mail.utexas.edu