I believe you are looking for ways to query splunk via command line. Yes, there are cli commands.
See here:
http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/latest/Admin/AbouttheCLI
For CLI searching specifically, see http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/5.0.3/SearchReference/AboutCLIsearches
Not sure what you mean by non-browser version - do you mean a Splunk instance that does not have the web interface activated? That's as easy as disabling the web interface. Set startwebserver = 0
in web.conf
(http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/latest/Admin/Webconf ).