Re^2: how to open a separate notepad

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");
[download]

Comment on Re^2: how to open a separate notepad Select or Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^3: how to open a separate notepad by GrandFather (Saint) on Jul 22, 2005 at 09:41 UTC
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.	[reply]
Re^3: how to open a separate notepad by davorg (Chancellor) on Jul 22, 2005 at 10:02 UTC
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	[reply]
Re^4: how to open a separate notepad by inman (Curate) on Jul 22, 2005 at 11:40 UTC
You are entirely correct. I was testing with a one-liner (`perl -e "exec('test.txt')"`) which doesn't point out that you never reach the line following the exec (because there isn't one!). Unfortunately, `system` by itself doesn't help because the Perl script is left waiting for notepad (or your favourite editor) to return. thundergnat provides the answer by modifying the command line to use the windows `start` command. This appears to be equivalent to the UNIX trailing apostrophe. `print "This happens before\n"; system ("start test.txt"); print "This happens afterwards\n";` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]