submit posts from script?

Is there an easy way to create a bunch of posts from the shell command line (e.g. from a php script)? I know I could write a little script to directly generate the MySQL INSERT commands, but it would be nicer to leverage the WP stuff that picks default values, etc. (I just have a bunch of files with titles and content). I’ve been looking at wp-admin/post.php and it doesn’t seem too straightforward to run something there outside the context of the admin pages.
Thanks!