Hi there,

pg is completely correct - look up Tk::after - using after or repeat is the way to do this. But on a side note, if your program is not going to be interactive you don't *need* to use MainLoop.

(I don't know why I'm mentioning this - I have a bad habit of bringing up the Wrong Way To Do It, just because I think it's interesting. I can feel the -- already.)

Instead of calling MainLoop you can write you own loop at the end that looks something like this:

while (1)
{
    &refresh;
    $mw->update;
    sleep 1;
}
[download]

But don't do that! The only good excuse that I can think of for doing something like this is if you want to popup a Tk status bar as your MainWindow while a script is doing something in the background (like parsing a really big file). In that case you don't need the interaction and the user is just sitting there and waiting for your script to stop running anyway.

By the way - I applaud your use of strict (and presumably warnings), but even with your my scoping your @blocks array is still being treated as a global. My preference is to pass a reference to you array around instead of just implying that you mean to use it globally.

What I like to do is create a $w hash and a $s hash and fill them with widgets and state information, then pass them to functions or Tk callbacks via reference. Of course, that is just a poor-persons form of OO, and works fine for simple scripts. This is what I mean:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Tk;
my $widgets = {};
$widgets->{main} = MainWindow->new;
$widgets->{button} = $widgets->{main}->Button(
    -text => "Whatever you do - don't push me",
    -command => [ \&callme, $widgets ]
)->pack;
MainLoop;

sub callme
{
    my $w = shift;
    $w->{main}->configure(-title => 'How dare you push me!');
    # Anything else in the $widgets hash is available here
    # too - handy if you have lots of widgets you need to
    # control from your functions or methods.
}
[download]

Anyway - just some food for thought. TMTOWTDI.
{NULE}
--
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