I have a situation where I need to run an external program.

Basically I guess what I'm doing is a kind of batch processing. I have a bunch of PDFs that I need to compress on MacOSX. I can call the program I need to run by passing it a single filename with system, but then my Perl program goes off into lala land waiting for the external program to return, but since its GUI it just sits there waiting for another file and never returning.

Is there a way to force the GUI to exit after it has processed the file I sent it? Or is there a better way to do what I'm trying to do? I've tried the whole filehandle pipe deal as shown in the Perl Cookbook, but that really doesn't do what I need to do. Since I'm not really writing to the program, just passing it another filename to work with.

Any help here will be greatly appreciated.

In reply to Running an external GUI program by mdrisser

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