Where street wise system maintains swear by the command-line tools and often see menu-based interfaces as overdone, the recent generations of computer-users fancy buttons to click on. What a waste to throw away all those useful tools, written on gifted late Saturday-nights. Know the feeling? Perl is an extremely powerful language. Combined with the Tk-library, it offers a way to program very complex interfaces in very compact code. Of course you can rewrite all you code to Perl, but you can also extent your powerful tool with Perl/Tk to create a graphical interface to it. The tutorial will give an extended introduction to Tk as part of Perl, and will explain Perl-couplings to C libraries, shell-scripts, and the UNIX-kernel. As an example, the transformation of an existing package is demonstrated. Attendants to this tutorial must have experience with Perl to the level of complex data-structures (references) and object-orientation.

Mark Overmeer got his MSc in Informatics from the University of Nijmegen, NL in 1990. Since then, he gained professional experience in maintaining a large variety of UNIX-systems, from tiny to super-computers. In his current occupation, this knowledge is taught to system-developers and -maintainers at AT Computing bv, a leading training institute on UNIX and UNIX-related languages in the Netherlands.