It's hard to say without more details about your CLI operations. Some scripts may be best rewritten, with some operations like file-selection,etc, done with the gui. Do you need the CLI programs to be launched and run in the background? Do you need to collect output from the CLI programs? There are many considerations, especially a thing called "blocking the GUI's event loop", which tends to be the biggest problem when making front-ends to CLI programs. But I would go with a combination of Tk, backticks, piped-opens, IPC::Open3, fork-and-exec, and threads. Tk is a good choice because so many people are familiar with it's techniques. and you can get more help. With Wx(or others) you may be on your own if you hit a problem, although Gtk2 and Wx are probably just as well suited as Tk.