PodMaster, you may find it irritating, that's your perogative. However, it is not always possible to use the commandline, and in those instances things like this are useful. The idea of being able to double-click an icon and it just running seems quite reasonable. I'd rather have that kind of useability than having to startup a console, navigate to the correct directory and then executing the script. Having something that can pause the window is hardly a "trick", Unix (well C) has had it for years.

You mention wperl. I had not previously heard of this app, and found this quite interesting. However, it still does not get round the problem that I have been experiencing. Unfortunately I cannot guarantee that anything other than a basic Perl install is available.

I am currently writing an InstallShield installation script. The basic copying/unpacking is done by InstallShield, but the detailed install and configuration is done by Perl (mainly PAR). InstallShield runs Perl in a commandline window, and if anything goes wrong you can be in a blink and you'll miss it scenario. The suggestion by davido to use logfiles is a fair one, but the message you want to appear on the screen maybe quite important for the user. Asking them to manually check logfiles after installation is not something I would recommend.

I'm currently looking into using PerlEz.dll (see 'Execute Perl Scripts from InstallScript' heading at http://www.installsite.org/pages/en/isp_ext.htm) within InstallShield and it seems to be working. But for the time being I'm stuck with the DOS window popping up.

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Barbie | Birmingham Perl Mongers | http://birmingham.pm.org/