Hi, I'm new to perl/tk & also not an advance perl programmer,
I have read many posts that windows + fork + perl/tk doesn't go well.

Here's my problem, I have a program written in perl and I'm preparing a GUI for it.
I'm calling my existing program when I click a button on my GUI. I'm redirecting the STDOUT to a
scrolled text widget using this:

tie *STDOUT, 'Tk::Text', $widget;

my existing program prints to STDOUT at different intervals but the GUI freezes till my program returns,
as a result I'm forking a new process which will call my program, Here's the code:

sub startButton_Click {
        tie *STDOUT, 'Tk::Text', $widget;
        unless ($pid = fork) {
          &Automation::Automate($testCase_text, $testSpec_text,
$config_text); # my program
          untie *STDOUT;
          exit 0;
        }
}

waitpid($pid, 0);

[download]

The above works just as expected except, that it throws an error and crashes,
just after the forked process finishes execution, this is the error:-

Attempt to free non-existent shared string '_TK_RESULT_' at C:/Perl/
site/lib/Tk.
pm line 247.
panic: restartop

[download]

I tried replacing the 'unless ($pid = fork)' block with an async{ } block (found this in some other forum),
but even then the same problem occurs with this error:-

Attempt to free non-existent shared string '_TK_RESULT_' at C:/Perl/
site/lib/Tk.
pm line 247.
thread failed to start: _TK_EXIT_(0)
Free to wrong pool 233ee8 not 31df658 during global destruction.

[download]

Please help!! am I doing something wrong here or can I completely avoid forking a new process

In reply to Please suggest a non-forking way to do this (OS: windows) by cranky

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