popen is really much simpler than what you think, just have a look at the manpage.

If you want to use system, keep in mind that it does not return the output of the program you want to run, but since the command is interpreted by the shell you can actually redirect stdout and/or stderr with something like:

system("command -options args > outfile");

and then read outfile

A third, much more exciting alternative, is to play with pipe, fork, dup, exec and do yourself what popen does. After this, you'll treat shell writers with much more respect :-)

-- TMTOWTDI

I'm guessing you want to hide the console output and have the wrapper use a Window instead? Use wperl (or is it perlw?) .exe instead of perl.exe to run the script.

—John

I need the user to key in some inputs (arg1 and arg2) after the program is invoked (i.e. he or she need only to specify the arguments but not type out the entire command as in c:\perl>perl program.pl arg1 arg2). Ideally, I would like to have the user simply select the options (the arguments) through a GUI interface without having to type at the command line. Can that be done with perl alone or do I need to use c++ to do the interface? Thanks in advance.