Hello fellow monks,

I love TK. The ease with which a gui can be built with Perl and TK is incredible.... but I digress from my problem.

I know there must be a simple solution, but as usual I am probably just overlooking the forest for the trees. Several of the scripts that I have created for use at work have to parse through many files and/or transfer files to and from remote workstations. This can take from 1 minute to 30 minutes depending on the script.

The precise problem that I am having is that I want the subruotine to be able to update the mainwindow (or toplevel window as appropriate) as to what it is doing. I have tried putting a label into the main window and having the subroutine configure->Label("This is what I am doing now"); but until the subroutine completes, none of these updates are actually executed by the window.
Example: 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Tk;
use LWP::Simple;
my($label);
my $w=new MainWindow;
my $root='http://www.billwfriend.com/outdoors/hiking/ricketts_glen';
my @pics=('DSC00005.JPG','DSC00006.JPG','DSC00007.JPG','DSC00008.JPG',
+'DSC00009.JPG','DSC00011.JPG','DSC00012.JPG','DSC00014.JPG','DSC00072
+.JPG');
$w->title("TK Sample");
my $test=$w->Button(-text=> 'Test',
    -command => sub{&test})->pack();
my $quit=$w->Button(-text=> 'Quit',
    -command => sub{exit})->pack();
    
    
&MainLoop;

sub test
    {
    $label=$w->Label(-text=>"Starting to get files.")->pack();
    foreach my $file (@pics)
        {
        &get_url($file);
        }
    }
sub    get_url
    {
    my $file=shift;

    $label->configure(-text=>"Starting to get $file");
    my $test=get("$root/$file");
    open(TEST, ">$file") || die"can't open $file\n";
    binmode TEST;  # for MSDOS derivations.
    print TEST $test;
    close TEST;
    $label->configure(-text=>"Got $file.");
    }

[download]
I know this code example could be made much cleaner, I just threw this together to illustrate my problem, the actual scripts I am speaking of are much larger.

In the above example, the Got $file does not get put into the MainWindow until the last file in @pics is processed.

How do I get the Perl/TK to execute the configure command immediately instead of waiting for the subroutine to complete? Or is there a better method altogether?

Thanks in advance for all your help.

-Kevin 
my $a='62696c6c77667269656e6440676d61696c2e636f6d';
while ($a=~m/(^.{2})/s)
{print unpack('A',pack('H*',"$1"));$a=~s/^.{2}//s;}

[download]

In reply to TK subroutine status by K_M_McMahon

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