Perl Script in background

Question

I have a perl script i made to automatically telnet into different servers . but its interface is only command line. To make it more user friendly for general windows users , i need to make GUI for it .

My idea is to make GUI in a language like VB,java ,etc and let that call perl script . my script will run in background in a command prompt and whatever the result it displays back in GUI.

Got some success. GUI in vb ,I run an instance of CMD in background ,run perl script in that .But that is wer program fails .As perl script runs in a thread for perl , i only get the output when script completes(rather say when it timeout). i need a mechanism where i can interact with the perl script , take output of script and show to user , then take input from user and so on .

Please can you all suggest me some way to actually make this happen.

PS: No limitation on using any language for GUI (as core work is done by perl script,GUI only there to give appropriate commands to script)

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Take a look at Perl's Win32::GUI

Answer 2

If you create your GUI in Java, one of the languages you suggested, you can run a perl script using the Runtime.exec() method. Here's the javadoc for the Runtime class.

As they suggest in the Sun forums, you have to execute the perl interpreter and pass the script as an argument. like "rt.exec("C:/perl.exe C:\runPerl.pl");".

In that forum, they also suggest looking at the following JavaWorld article. On page four of the article, DaConta gives a good demonstration of capturing output from the perl script, which I believe should suit your needs. Input works similarly, also using streams.