stangoesagain has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm using UI::Dialog to select a file for processing. When I get to this point: 

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.010;
use UI::Dialog;

my $d = new UI::Dialog ( 
                title => 'SelectFile',
                order => [ 'kdialog', 'zenity', 'xdialog' ] 
                );
my $fileIn = $d->fselect( path => '/path/to/my/files/' );
say "Selected: $fileIn";

[download]

The selected file name prints to the terminal but $fileIn in say "Selected: $fileIn"; line is empty. I swear it worked just a few months ago when I first created this script.

If I initialize $fileIn first and assign it some value, "test", for example, fselect still makes it empty again.

What gives? Is it something system related? I got it working with Tk but Tk doesn't look as nice as KDE's native file selection dialog.

UPDATE: As a workaround I used Capture::Tiny, put fselect into a sub, and chomped the return. 

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.010;
use UI::Dialog;
use Capture::Tiny ':all';

my $d = new UI::Dialog ( title => 'SelectFile',
      order => [ 'kdialog', 'zenity', 'xdialog' ] );
sub filename{
   my $selected = $d->fselect( path => '/path/to/my/files/' );
   return $selected;
}


my $fileIn = capture_stdout \&filename;
chomp $fileIn; #because there's newline at the end of stdout

say "Selected: $fileIn";

[download]

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: UI::Dialog fselect
by Marshall (Canon) on Apr 21, 2016 at 12:09 UTC
    I installed UI::Dialog and got the following results, something is wrong as shown below... Missing module? 
    #!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.010;
use UI::Dialog;

my $d = new UI::Dialog ( backtitle => 'Demo', title => 'Default',
                         height => 20, width => 65 , listheight => 5,
   ## this is a problem ###  order => [ 'zenity', 'xdialog' ] );
                     );
  
  # Either a Zenity or Xdialog msgbox widget should popup,
  # with a preference for Zenity.
  $d->msgbox( title => 'Welcome!', text => 'Welcome one and all!' );
  
  __END__
  Prints:
  
  +-------------------------------------------------------------------
+----------+
  | Demo                                                              
+          |
  +-------------------------------------------------------------------
+----------+
  |                                                                   
+          |
  | +-----------------------------------------------------------------
+--------+ |
  | |                                Welcome!                         
+        | |
  | +-----------------------------------------------------------------
+--------+ |
  | | Welcome one and all!                                            
+        | |
  | |                                                                 
+        | |
  | |                                                                 
+        | |
  | |                                                                 
+        | |
  | |                                                                 
+        | |
  | |                                                                 
+        | |
  | |                                                                 
+        | |
  | |                                                                 
+        | |
  | |                                                                 
+        | |
  | |                                                                 
+        | |
  | |                                                                 
+        | |
  | |                                                                 
+        | |
  | |                                                                 
+        | |
  | +-----------------------------------------------------------------
+--------+ |
  |                                                                   
+          |
  +-------------------------------------------------------------------
+----------+
                           [ Press Enter to Continue ]
  Process completed successfully

    [download]
[reply]
[d/l]

      That's an idea - I've tried with zenity being preferred and fselect assigns value to variable as expected. I don't have xdialog installed so if I try xdialog I get "unable to load suitable backend" but not terminal output like yours.

      I suspect kdialog part of UI::Dialog hasn't been updated to work with latest KDE. On my system there was a jump from 4 to 5, not sure about exact version when it got broken. I use kdialog for file selection all the time and it works flawlessly when evoked by bash scripts.

[reply]

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