For your first question the simplest way is

perl -e"system 'start cmd';"
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Depending upon what you want to do with the new command shell, then you may want to follow the "cmd" part with /c or /k and then the command you want to run.

That works great but I cannot seem to feed the command I want to the newly spawned command prompt. What would the syntax be for that?

system("perl -e\"system 'start cmd';\" /c perl \"$filename\"");
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I have tried the preceeding code and a few other variations but have been unsuccesfull.

Based on your example, you want to run another perl script from within your perl program, and have it present its output in a separate cli window, then this maybe what you are looking for.

my $filename = 'some perl script (potentially with spaces).pl';

system qq[ start cmd /k perl "$filename" ];
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Using qq// for the outer set of quotes removes the need to escape the inner ones needed around the filename whilst still allowing $filename to be interpolated. See Quote-like operators for more info.

Using /k will ensure that the window remains and the script output is visible after the command has ended.

---

Examine what is said, not who speaks.

"Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham
"Think for yourself!" - Abigail
Hooray!

All you need to do to run a command with options is to join them in one long string. eg.

my $process = join (" ",$execution_path, $options);
system ($process);
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However, this won't work with the command prompt as you can't pass further instructions to a command line without a special option switch (/K). I don't really understand why you need to open another DOS Box to run something, as the system() command will wait for the process to terminate before continuing. Nevertheless, with the /K option, your script should open a new DOS box to run the script.

my $execution_path = "cmd.exe";
my $options = "/K C:\\Perl\\Perl.exe myscript.pl";

my $process = join (" ",$execution_path, $options);
system ($process);
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However, if you can't get what you want out of system(), then check out Win32::Process, this has numerous facilities for creating and manipulating processes, you can even suspend or kill processes at a PID level. As for the TK question, I'm afriad that I haven't even started looking at TK yet.


Seems BrowserUK got there before me on the /K thing though....

First off, on the subject of Tk, I highly recommend "Mastering Perl Tk" (the O'Reilly Emu Book) for a reference on all things Tk. It is very easy to understand (more so than most computer books) and it includes some features of Tk that you probably aren't going to pick up easily from reading CPAN.

I haven't done too much with images in Tk, yet, but I have added images to a Canvas using Tk::Photo.

http://search.cpan.org/~ni-s/Tk-804.025_beta8/pod/Photo.pod

Apparently, you can also use Tk::Bitmap to add icons to Labels (and I presume buttons as well). Out of respect for the author's work, I won't copy the examples I have from the Emu book.

bgstipple is apparently for drawing patterns, not graphics, so I would avoid trying to use that if there are files you would like to display.

Don't forget the very useful and undocumented:

    system( 1, "command line goes here" );
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It is just too bad that the way it was implemented (the magical numeric "1" which also prevents use of an indirect object, I think) is just crufty enough that it isn't supported in Unixish builds of Perl. It would be handy even in Unix as the alternatives aren't quite as nice (and the big win would be that we'd then have a portable way of doing this in Perl).

I'd like to have it in Unix (all) Perl even with the current cruftiness.