[Crash-utility] calling crash from another program (or vice versa)

Often, I'd like to be able to run one crash command, massage the data produced, and run follow up commands using the massaged data A (possibly crazy) example, run the mount command, collect the superblocks addresses, for each super_block, get the s_inodes list head, traverse each list head to the inode, for each inode, find it's i_data (address_space) and get the number of pages.. Now.. sum these up and print a table of filesystem mounts points and the number of cached pages for each... Perhaps, I'd even traverse the struct pages to provide a count of clean and dirty pages for each file system. I do do this by hand. (i.e. mount > mount.file; perlscript mount.file > crash-script-step-1, then, back in crash I do ". crash-script-step-1 > data-file-2; and repeat with more massaging).. This is gross, prone to error, and not terribly fast. I'd love to start crash as a child of perl and either use expect (which is a bit of a hack) or better yet, have some machine interface to crash (ala gdbmi)... I know.. it's open source, I should write it myself. I just don't want to reinvent the wheel, if someone else already has done something like this. Perhaps I need to learn sial. But what little sial I've looked at seems a bit low level for my needs. Has anyone had much luck using expect with crash? thanks - jim