I recently blogged about Ask, my new(ish) module for interacting with users via STDIN/STDOUT, a GUI, or whatever means possible.

Writing GUI code in Perl unfortunately requires you to compile non-core modules such as Gtk2, Wx or Tk. There is an alternative no-compilation-required approach though: most modern Linux and BSD distributions ship with (or at least package for separate download) a program called Zenity. Zenity is a tool for adding basic GUI dialogue boxes to shell scripts. You call it like this:

zenity --file-selection

And it will display a standard file chooser. Once a file is chosen, Zenity will print the file path to STDOUT and then exit.

Ask provides Ask::Zenity, a wrapper around Zenity, and will fall back to that if Wx, Gtk2, Tk, etc are not available. However, none of this really addresses Windows...