<p>The standalone flashplayer takes no arguments other than a .swf file when you launch it from the command line. I need the player to go full screen, no window borders and such. This can be accomplished by hitting ctrl+f once the program has started. I want to do this programmatically as I need it to launch into full screen without any human interaction.</p>

<p>My guess is that I need to some how get a handle to the window and then send it an event that looks like the "ctrl+f" keystroke. </p>

<p>If it makes any difference, it looks like flashplayer is a gtk application and I have python with pygtk installed.</p>

<p><b>UPDATE</b> (the solution I used... thanks to ypnos' answer):</p>

<pre><code>./flashplayer http://example.com/example.swf &amp; sleep 3 &amp;&amp; ~/xsendkey -window "Adobe Flash Player 10" Control+F
</code></pre>

I've actually done this a long time ago, but it wasn't petty.  What we did is use the
Sawfish window manager
and wrote a hook to recognize the flashplayer window, then strip all the decorations and snap it full screen.
This may be possible without using the window manager, by registering for X window creation events from an external application, but I'm not familiar enough with X11 to tell you how that would be done.
Another option would be to write a pygtk application that embedded the standalone flash player inside a gtk.Socket and then resized itself.  After a bit of thought, this might be your best bet.