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PuTTY wish scripting

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Many people would find it useful for PuTTY to have a general scripting mechanism. There are a lot of uses for something like this:

• Automating movement through menu systems on servers.
• Assigning common commands to function keys.
• For MUD users: being able to set up triggers so that PuTTY automatically sends commands when particular events happen on the server.
• Chaining connections. For example, the recommended way to connect to Monochrome BBS is to make a preliminary Telnet connection to a central server which will tell you which of the usable machines has the lowest load, and then to make a Telnet or SSH connection to that machine. A scripting facility would allow PuTTY to do things like this automatically.
• Remembering your password for you. (Obviously we don't recommend you do this, on security grounds; but in one or two situations it might be helpful.)
• Implementing key-mapping fully generally.
• Performing arbitrary transformations on clipboard contents.

We do have a scripting language half-way written for this purpose, though it's unclear when (if) it will ever be finished.

A scripting language is liable to be a fairly big piece of code, so the language interpreter might end up having to be implemented as a DLL plugin. Hence this feature is dependent on us creating a DLL plugin interface first.

It's been suggested by several people that using the underlying OS's built-in scripting mechanisms might help. A problem with this is that it prevents PuTTY scripts being portable between OSes, which in turn means that we can't use the scripting language to implement any of PuTTY itself.