Lets say I have this repetitve task I want to script. For example, every night I turn on an alarm clock app to wake me up. Then I set my screen saver for 1 min. My speakers are in the monitor, so I can't turn it off.

This seems like a typical repetitive task that would be good to script and stick in a cron file. But I don't actually know what those little gui buttons have done.
So how do I find out?

Now the truth is I can probably figure out some work around to accomplish this task.
But the general question is one that I don't have an exact answer to. So I thought it would be good for beginner forum.
How do you figure out how a gui application actually did what it did? It is not always easy.

Hi there,

You could download the source code of the clock application (usually a *.tar.gz archive) and have a look at the program's functions and utilities being used.

If the gui tool can also be used as a command line tool, learn how to make it do what you want done from the command line.

Once you understand what happened from the command line, you will understand what happened when you pointed and clicked in the gui.