Doing:

if ($^O eq 'darwin' ) {
  system( open => $url ) == 0
    or die "could not open $url";
};
[download]

Should work if the user hasn't misconfigured their box.

And just to elaborate, open will also do basically what double-clicking on any item in the Finder would do (open it in the default application, or open a directory in a Finder window). There's also an open source app called launch which can do similar things as well as ask apps to print documents.

Not that that's got anything to do with perl . . . :)

That may work on a Mac but not on Win32 for some reason. I'm getting the message:

MSWin32'open' is not recognized as an internal or external command, op
+erable program or batch file.
[download]

Using an exec does open the browser, but the program closes after it hits the exec. Any other ideas on how to do this under Win32 without having to use HTML::DIsplay?

Useless trivia: In the 2004 Las Vegas phone book there are approximately 28 pages of ads for massage, but almost 200 for lawyers.

That may work on a Mac but not on Win32 for some reason

The $^O eq 'darwin' should have given that away :-). It's a Max OS X specific binary.

you know, a very short time ago some AM asked how to do this on windows, juse HTML::Display

Is there a way of getting HTML::Display to open a URL directly - I thought it only displayed HTML supplied from Perl?

Sure

$$ perldoc HTML::Display::TempFile

NAME
    HTML::Display::TempFile - base class to display HTML via a temporary
    file

SYNOPSIS
      package HTML::Display::External;
      use base 'HTML::Display::TempFile';

      sub browsercmd {
        # Return the string to pass to system()
        # %s will be replaced by the temp file name
      };

Replace file with url and you're in business. All the modules such as

HTML::Display::Galeon
HTML::Display::Mozilla
HTML::Display::Opera
HTML::Display::OSX
HTML::Display::Debian
HTML::Display::Phoenix
HTML::Display::Win32

provide this which is what the author is after.

MJD says "you can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo!"

I run a Win32 PPM repository for perl 5.6.x and 5.8.x -- I take requests (README).

** The third rule of perl club is a statement of fact: pod is sexy.