Command line reports?

[Tony Bloomfield]

I'd like to develop a simple application (preferably as a shell script, though
Perl or QT would be other possibilities) which can pick up the current (or at
least fairly recent) balance on a gnucash account.
On browsing the site, I see a mention of the possibility to run reports from 
the command line, though it suggests that this is now broken. Is this so? (I 
don't seem to be able to track down much documentation on command line 
options within gnucash).
Otherwise, I could run the Account Summary report manually (from within the 
GUI), but then the only possibility seems to be to save it as an HTML file, 
which makes programmatic analysis less than trivial. A straight text file 
would be much preferable. Any ideas?
(Hoping I'm not missing something obvious here!)

Cheers,
TonyB