Re: system() on linux/win32

Ah HAH! You're trying to get Windows to spawn a child process. It'll never work!! ...But you can fake it.

Long story short: system("start " . $excel, $excelfilename);

If you want Perl to spawn your Excel process but keep on doing its jiggy Perl-thing, instead of calling Excel yourself, you should tell Windows to do it for you. This is done with the DOS "start" command. Try it out. Bring up a DOS prompt and enter "notepad". It'll come up normal. Close it and enter "start notepad". Same thing. Now here's the interesting part. Put this on the command line:

perl -e "system('notepad'); print 'NaSe77 rules!'"

This will bring up the notepad, but it won't tell you who rules until you close notepad. Finally try this:

perl -e "system('start notepad'); print 'NaSe77 rules the Kingdom of Notepad, baby!'"

The notepad is up, and the print statement functions right away. Instant fake fork. Ain't life grand?

It took me a week and a half of looking for this on Perlmonks when I needed it. I can't remember where I found it, but props to mystery monk who originally posted this solution. -the Pedro Picasso
(sourceCode == freeSpeech)

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Re: Re: system() on linux/win32 by blogan (Monk) on Apr 26, 2002 at 02:40 UTC
I believe when you use start you can just give it the filename and it will open it with the application that's associated with it.	[reply]
Re: Re: Re: system() on linux/win32 by robin (Chaplain) on Apr 26, 2002 at 10:12 UTC
Just for completeness in case someone comes here looking, it's worth mentioning that the equivalent command on OS X is `open`. Though of course OS X can do fork() properly.	[reply]


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