Hi, I will just mention a couple of design considerations, after reading the other replies.

First, system may not be the best option if you want to direct the output directly to a text box, you will need to use "piped opens" or "IPC::Open3"( or a similar method) along with Tk's fileevent to read the output. This will collect and display the output of long-running programs, without "blocking the gui". Additionally, this will allow you to run more than one command at a time. Backticks could be used to capture the output, if the command will complete quickly.

A cool way to do this, would be with a Notebook widget, and a menu. The menu would allow you to select which command to run, and then it would open a new notebook page with the command name in the tab-text, and an entry widget for the extra options, and an output text widget on the page.

Another ready to go module which will help you do this is the Tk::ExecuteCommand module. Here is a simple example, but you can launch commands as many as you want, and they will open in a new window.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use Tk;
use Tk::ExecuteCommand;
use Tk::widgets qw/LabEntry/;
use strict;

my $mw = MainWindow->new;

my $top = $mw->Toplevel;
$top->withdraw;

my $ec = $top->ExecuteCommand(
    -command    => '',
    -entryWidth => 50,
    -height     => 10,
    -label      => '',
    -text       => 'Execute',
                                  )->pack;
$ec->configure(-command => 'date; sleep 10; date');


my $button = $mw->Button(-text =>'Do_it',
                         -background =>'hotpink',
                         -command => sub{ $top->deiconify;
                                          $top->raise;
                                          $ec->execute_command;
                                          $top->withdraw},
                        )->pack;

MainLoop;
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