Very simplistic example. Modify to suit.

use strict;
use warnings;
use Tk;

my $top = MainWindow->new;

$top->geometry('100x100');

my $file = 'C:/Autoexec.bat';

$top->Button(
    -text => 'Click Me',
    -command => sub{ system "start C:/Windows/Notepad.exe $file" }
)->pack;

MainLoop;
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thanks for your reply thundergnat this code works only in win2000 how can i make it to work in win98 please suggest a way

I have a routine I've used in the past when I needed start up an external executable. This will work cross-platform on Win95, Win98, WinME, Win2k, WinXP, Linux, OSX and probably many others. The only caveat is that you must have no file named "spawn.pl" in the directory your script resides in. You will probably need to adjust the calling parameters for different OS's (It is unlikely that Linux or OSX will have an executable called "NotePad"), but in general this is pretty cross platform.

It is essentially just a fork and exec, without explicitly doing one. Useful, because it is extremely difficult to fork a program running under Perl/Tk, (under Windows, at least), This neatly sidesteps the problem.

use strict;
use warnings;
use Tk;

my $top = MainWindow->new;

$top->geometry('100x100');

$top->Button(
    -text => 'Open A File',
    -command => sub{
                    my $types = [
                ['Text Files', [qw/.txt .text .bat/]],
                ['All Files',    ['*']],
                ];
                my $filename = $top->getOpenFile(-title => 'Open File'
+);
                if (defined $filename)
                {
                    spawn('Notepad.exe', $filename)
                }
                }
)->pack;

MainLoop;


sub spawn{    # Routine to spawn another perl process and use it to ex
+ecute an external program
    my $args = join ' ', @_;
    unless (-e 'spawn.pl'){
        open my $spawn, '>', 'spawn.pl';
        print $spawn 'exec @ARGV;';
    }
    if ($^O =~ /Win/) {
        $args = '"'.$args.'"';
    }else{
        $args .= ' &';
    }
    system "perl spawn.pl $args";
}
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Assumes you have files junk{1,2,3}.dat in the current directory.

use Tk;

my $mw = new MainWindow();
my $content;
my $text = $mw->Text()->pack();
$text->Insert( "junk1.dat\njunk2.dat\njunk3.dat\n" );
my $ok = $mw->Button(
    -text => "View in Notepad",
    -command => sub{
        my $file = $text->getSelected;
        system 1, "notepad $file";
    }
)->pack();
MainLoop;
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The other people replying to your question probably know far more about Windows and Perl/Tk programming than I do, but it seems to me that your simplest option would be to run something like:

system("notepad $path_to_text_file");
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system will wait for notepad to finish executing before the Perl code continues. If you wanted to just launch notepad and continue then you would use exec.

Similarly if you just wanted to start the default application then you can omit the program and just exec the file. In this situation, exec may be essential because the default editor may support multiple documents and the user wouldn't necessarily want to close it. The Perl application won't have to wait.

#launch notepad explicitly
exec ("notepad $path_to_text_file");

# or launch the default application
exec ("$path_to_text_file");
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exec is not such a good choice as it does not return. Click the first button, and that's all she wrote mate.

Best answer probably is to simply open another top level Tk window to display the text for the additional file.

I'm a newbie at Tk so I can't provide good code to do that, but it's likely to be fairly easy. Maybe I'll try after I've done the shopping :)

---

Perl is Huffman encoded by design.

I think you mean "fork" and then "exec" in the new child process.

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

"The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club."
-- Chip Salzenberg

The following code allows a number of top level windows to be opened by clicking a button in the main window. A little work will get OP to creating a Text widget in each window to display the text files.

use strict;
use warnings;
use Tk;

my $main = MainWindow->new;
$main->Button (-text => "new window", -command => \&newTextWnd)->pack 
+();
MainLoop;

sub newTextWnd
{
$main->Toplevel ();
}
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• How do I start two programs without waiting for first one to be finished ?
• How do I run another program from within my Perl program
• Does it possible to run an outer program in perl?

I suggest that you don't want to launch Notepad per se, but whatever text editor the user has associated with the .txt extension. Windows, starting at least with Win2k, will open an associated application when the data file is executed. Therefore, the following opens Notepad with filename.txt loaded on most systems:

sub { system 1,"filename.txt" }
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Of course, you'll want to replace "filename.txt" with a variable or function call or something to determine which filename you'll be opening.