note Another Ed <p>Hi choroba, you've lost me a bit here. thundergnat suggested I run the external program with 'start', which I believe puts the program into the background on Windows. As I replied to his post, doing this means that Perl doesn't wait for the external program to finish, but steams on regardless. That is no good to me. </p> <p>It would be nice if there <i>were</i> some way of making Perl wait. You say "make its finish an event". That sounds promising, except that I haven't a clue how to translate that into code. Surely we're hampered here by the fact that Windows doesn't have a readily accessible process table, so I can't do things like 'system ("ps", ...)'?</p> <p>One thing that's occurred to me is that I could try a 'fork' call for the external process, combined with 'waitpid'. These, I understand, are emulated on Windows by Perl. It just seems a bit of a sledgehammer to crack this nut, but at the rate this thing is going, I will have to try it. </p>Ed 1014459 1014660