FWIW, you can pop up progress bars from perl, though it does require turning the perl program into a Cocoa app with Sherm's CamelBones framework. (I think the Mac::Carbon module(s?) may do this as well, but you may or may not still have to turn the program into an application)
You can fire full-scale .apps off via cron--just dig through the bundle and find the real executable, and use its full pathname. (No relative paths, and no invocations via PATH env vars. Cocoa does *not* like that) For example, to fire off emacs which is living in /Applications you'd just invoke /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs. You can even pass in parameters, which'll show in @ARGV for perl programs.
I suppose it'd be possible to build a progress app that took test-style output (you know, the "18 tests", "ok 1", "ok 2" stuff) from the child process and did the progress bar while the child did its thing and spat its status info to its stdout...
Dan
http://www.ihook.org
I'm working on a similar app but is less functional so that it launches faster.
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Thanks,
James Reynolds University of Utah Student Computing Labs [EMAIL PROTECTED] 801-585-9811
