Is it possible to open Notepad and output results to it instead of saving it to a .txt file and having to open the file manually?

Let me interpolate what you are trying to do by what you have just said. My thinking is you could do this one of two ways: First would be some sort of funk-a-delic OLE set of calls which I am not privy to since I don't do windows.

The other way I'd approach the problem is as follows:

#  hand waving here... 
#
# No, I wouldn't really write a Perl script without use'ing strict. 
#      :-D 

open FOUT,"> myfile.txt" or die "myfile.txt:$!";

# do writes here 

close FOUT;

system("notepad.exe myfile.txt");


# untested code.  Please do not use this for anything 
# that could be potentially life threatening
# lest the fleas of a thousand camels infest your 
# armpits and drive you buggy.
[download]

What I'm driving at is at some point you should actually write the file and then use notepad to view it. What I'm not sure about, and the windows crowd can help here, is what happens to the notepad.exe process when the script exits.

Hope this is of some help...