Ride the D-Bus, Control your Linux desktop from the shell

From the D-Bus documentation: “D-Bus is an inter-process communication mechanismâ€â€a medium for local communication between processes running on the same host. (Inter-host connects may be added in the future, but that is not what D-Bus is meant for). D-Bus is meant to be fast and lightweight, and is designed for use as a unified middleware layer underneath the main free desktop environments”