I have been slaving away at a few Perl/TK applications that are about ready to be released to the big wide world. I have developed the code to be as OS independent as possible and am trying to clear up a few last points. On the "About" window of the app's there is a button that opens an url in the users preferred web browser.
The code below illustrates the windows method I'm using:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w <br>
  use strict; <br>
  my $url = "http://www.perlmonks.org/"; <br>
  use Win32::FileOp qw(ShellExecute); <br>
  my $rc = ShellExecute("open", $url);
[download]

The user documentation with graphics is a pdf file which is also opened the same way.

Does anyone know
1. An OS independent way of opening an url or file from a Perl/TK application that won't lock the original application or
2. A method suitable for MacOSX, Linux, Sun OS's?

This is probably trivial to anyone with U*NIX skills and I'm sure someone has done this before. Any help appreciated.