It sounds like Marshall was correct and you want to use the windows start command to start up the external program in a new process. Assuming you have the extension associated, you can just do:

system("start documentation.doc")

to start up the default application. If not, or if you want to use a non-default application, supply the executable name (if it is in the path) or the path to the executable (if it isn't).

system("start wordpad.exe documentation.doc")

In reply to Re^3: Unresponsive Perl Tk GUI when using system() calls by thundergnat
in thread Unresponsive Perl Tk GUI when using system() calls by amdme127

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