in reply to A few random questions.

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.

Examine what is said, not who speaks.
"Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham
"Think for yourself!" - Abigail
Hooray!

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Re: Re: A few random questions.
by Elijah (Hermit) on Dec 09, 2003 at 23:21 UTC
    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.
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[d/l]

      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!
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[d/l]
        Worked great, thank you!
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      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....

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