This sort of thing actually requires a couple of important steps. You need to spawn a separate process to run the application, and you need to interact with the running application from your script to "push the buttons".

Under Windows Win32::Process is probably the best way to run the application independently of your Perl script.

Interacting with the running application from your Perl script is easiest with Win32::GuiTest. Using either of these modules requires a little work. The following is a very brief example to get you started:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Win32;
use Win32::Process;
use Win32::GuiTest;

my $fileName = 'delme.txt';
my $filePath = "$ENV{TEMP}\\$fileName";
my $app      = "$ENV{SystemRoot}\\Notepad.exe";
my $cmd      = "notepad $filePath";
my $ProcessObj;

unlink $filePath;
Win32::Process::Create ($ProcessObj, $app, $cmd, 0, NORMAL_PRIORITY_CL
+ASS, ".")
    || die ErrorReport ();

#FindWindowLike($window,$titleregex,$classregex,$childid,$maxlevel)
my @windows = Win32::GuiTest::WaitWindow (qr"^Notepad"i, 3);

die "Expected to find Notepad's new document dialog\n" if ! @windows;
Win32::GuiTest::SetForegroundWindow ($windows[0]);
Win32::GuiTest::SendKeys ("%y");

@windows = Win32::GuiTest::WaitWindow (qr"^$fileName"i, 3);
die "Expected to find Notepad\n" if ! @windows;
Win32::GuiTest::SetForegroundWindow ($windows[0]);
Win32::GuiTest::SendKeys ("Hello World%fs%fx");


sub ErrorReport {
    print Win32::FormatMessage (Win32::GetLastError ());
}
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