Back in the days of dumb terminals talking to Unix servers we had an accounts package that had to be fed a new re-licensing key at intervals and it would simply issue a reminder that that was falling due at the start of every terminal session. I'd cobbled together an arrangement (in modern parlance, written an bot) that enabled our order processing system to make account enquiries on it. That got into trouble when it first encountered the reminder. Eventually, because back then our database system, Informix, shared a C-ISAM base with the accounts package, it was possible to persuade it* that the accounting files were database tables and read them directly.
*Create a database with tables corresponding to the structure of the foreign package, delete the data and index files and replace them with links to the files you want to read.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
