Dave Girard with a quick demonstration of using Maya in “headless” mode or in Command Line Batch Mode which can be really useful because it can be shell scripted and used with variables like multiple selected files. Check out the complete article on Dave’s site for Using Maya in Command Line Batch Mode here.
Maya has three methods of interacting with it without a GUI. The first is by sending it commands via Unix standard output and a commandPrompt port (covered here), the second is in prompt mode where it basically runs in a terminal as a MEL or Python interpreter, letting you open scenes and process them with text commands.