It’s been possible to use various scripting languages to automate GIMP for a long time. But until recently Perl bindings for GIMP were considerably out of date due to lack of interest from contributors. Fortunately, a while ago Ed J started working on updating those, and now a release candidate is available for testing.

Gimp-Perl version 2.30_05 is on CPAN now. It supports GIMP 2.8 and provides the following features:

• An autosave script (not installed by default, examples/autosave2) will save in its own directory files that were opened and changed, then reopen them on GIMP startup; if installed, will start along with GIMP.
• A plugin registry viewer, installed by default to Filters/Browse Plug-in Registry.
• A Perl console, installed by default to Filters/Perl/Console.

The way to install the release candidate on Linux is:

perl -MCPAN -e "install 'ETJ/Gimp-2.30_05.tar.gz'"

If you encounter any bugs, please report them on bugzilla.gnome.org.