You know after some thought and investigation it became apparant to me that if you have a long running process you always need to output the "fileevent" using the below subroutine. If not your gui freezes until the event finishes. Personally I think this subroutine should included as a feature or at least in the code given in the "fileevent" documentation considering it appears to be a common thing people want to do.

Essentially it goes like this ... create a widget to write to (a scrollable text box in your mainwindow $mw in this example), open your handle and call the fileevent ...

my $tx = $mw->Scrolled("Text", -width => 80,
                -height => 25,
                -wrap => 'none',
                )->pack(-expand => 1,
                    -fill => 'both');
open(CHILD, "ls -laR |") or die "Can't open: $!";
CHILD->autoflush(1);
$mw->fileevent('CHILD', 'readable', [\&output, \*CHILD, $mw, $tx]);
[download]

Include the following subroutine to output what is streamed to the filehandle without freezing the GUI.

sub output {
    my ($handle, $widget, $tx) = @_;
    
    if (sysread ($handle, $_, 128)) {
        $tx->insert('end', $_); # Append the data read
        $tx->yview('end');
    } else {
        $tx->insert('end', "\nALL DONE\n");
        $tx->yview('end');
        $widget->fileevent($handle, "readable", undef); # cancel bindi
+ng
        ###----->>> Add in cancel routine here if you want to exit gra
+cefully
        return;
    }
    $widget->idletasks;
}
[download]

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