How can I add menu items to the Gnome "Applications" menu from the command line?

"Here's a link for a shell script which will create entries in GNOME's menu
Snippet of the post:

I have seen this question asked
frequently on the Ubuntu forums. This
page will teach you how. You as a
user can make your own menu entry by
right clicking on the menu icon in the
upper left corner and selecting Edit
Menus. This bring up a GUI an you can
select which section to install the
menu item in. We want to create one
via a shell script.
All menu items are stored in the
/usr/share/applications folder. In
that folder there will be a .desktop
file for each menu entry. Lets get
into those .desktop files shall we?
Here is an example of the contents of
a .desktop file: What the following
code does is make a menu entry called
Kompozer in the Programming section of
the Gnome menu."

"In addition to the link Sathya provided, this also shows how to automate adding additional menus to the Applications menu:

http://wiki.matusov.sk/howto/gnome-menu-edit"