Launching explorer.exe will not really help your users because Explorer.exe doesn't talk back to your program. I would look at Win32::GUI::Reference::Methods::OpenFile or ::BrowseForFolder. Another alternative would be to use Tk, but I don't really know that much about it.

See Win32::FileOp::OpenDialog().

#!usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

use Tk;

my $mw = MainWindow->new;
#$mw->geometry("1000x400+0+0");

my $menu_f = $mw->Frame()->pack(-side=>'top',-fill=>'x');
my $menu_file = $menu_f->Menubutton
                    (-text=>'File',-tearoff=>'false')
                    ->pack(-side=>'left');
                    
$menu_file->command(-label=>'Open',
            -command=> \&open_log); 
$menu_file->command(-label=>'Save',
            -command=> sub {print "in Save\n";}); 
$menu_file->command(-label=>'Close',
            -command=> sub {print "in Close\n";});             
$menu_file->command(-label=>'Exit',-command=>\&exit_msg);

sub open_log {
  
  my @types =
       (["log files", [qw/ .log/]],
        ["All files",        '*'],
       );
  my $file = $mw->getOpenFile(-filetypes => \@types) or return;
  print "$file\n";
  
  ########
  ###  call worker program here
  ##########
}

sub exit_msg{
  my $response = $mw->messageBox( -title => "some title",
      -message => "Do you really want to exit?\nAll unsaved work will 
+be lost!\n\n", 
  -type => 'YesNoCancel');
  print "exit_msg response = $response\n";
  exit() if ($response =~ /^yes$/i); 
}
MainLoop;
[download]

Cross posted at StackOverflow. When you cross-post on numerous sites, please let all sites know you're doing so, as to not waste people's time working on a solution when one could already be located somewhere else.

Here's a very simple example from my SO answer. It requires only a single use statement (you'll have to install Tk first, of course), and one line of code. It's also cross-platform:

use warnings;
use strict;

use Tk;

my $file = Tk::MainWindow->new->getOpenFile;

print "selected file: $file\n\n";

open my $fh, '<', $file or die $!;

while (<$fh>){
    print;
}
[download]

I posted a more involved Tk starter script at the original node, Re: select input file from windows explorer that shows the file type options.

At least with Active State, Tk comes with the distribution, so there is nothing to install. There are about 280 modules that shipped with the distribution I'm currently using, Perl 5.20.

I saw that Marshall, but not until I had this post done. I figured that since it didn't appear they were using any GUI and this seemed to be the only UI feature they needed, it'd do it.

It's nice that you posted a full-blown example though, for sure.

Perhaps I'll consider all of the nodes under the anonymonk posting to be re-parented up here.

What I usually do, is write the GUI in another language, like powershell, then get those variables, and run perl with these as parameters. This way, the same perl script works if you want to automate things (non-interactively).

If you still want to use Perl, that works too, of course:

Win32::GUI or TK: How do I make Open and Save As file dialogs? (Win32)

Personally, I like AutoIT3 or VBScript

Here's another idea: If you want any file to be the STDIN for a particular Perl Script on your computer, you could do this: Create a file named MyScript.pl that takes some data from STDIN and does something with it. Then create a file called X.BAT that executes your script like so:

@ECHO OFF
C:\BIN\PERL\TINYPERL -I C:\BIN\PERL\LIB C:\BIN\PERL\MYSCRIPT.PL < "%1"

ECHO.
PAUSE
[download]

What this does is it allows you to right-click on any text file in Windows Explorer, and when the context menu comes up, you can select Print, and instead of printing the text file, it will feed it to your Perl script through STDIN. ;)

oh that's great - thanks for the clear input, monks!

matt

PS sorry about the double posting...