Mailing the story:

I recently came acrossexpect (the expect package in Debian and Ubuntu): a powerful utility that can script interactive operations. If you're not familiar with TCL syntax, you can get autoexpect from Wi-Fizzle.com. This spawns a shell, and then records everything you do in that shell. Hit Ctrl-C when you're done, and then either run the generated expect script as-is, or edit it to tidy it up a bit. In particular, autoexpect records keystrokes one by one, whereas you can put them all in at once. It records the full prompt, where the $ at the end may suffice.