next if ($status ne 'NOT-GOOD') {

# CHECK OTHER ORDER NUMBER VIA LINK
}
[download]

syntax error at -e line 8, near ") {"
[download]

while ( my @order_fields= $query->fetchrow_array() ) {
   my $ordernumber = $order_fields[0] or die "Error: Expected a non-ze
+ro order number" ;
   my $url = "link.com/$ordernumber";
   ...
}
[download]

Why does this smell like an item-scalping abuse bot?

That the order timestamps are all one-second before midnight is ... odd, as are the statuses ... is this an eBay sniping tool?

I normally do not worry too much about what questioners are asking for help doing, but this looks less like an XY Problem and more like an XY-Crooked Problem.

Congratulations, bigup401, you have finally exhausted my assumption of good faith and I think this just might be the first time I have -- voted one of your questions.

> Why does this smell like an ... abuse bot?

I thought you were referring to the OP. :)

If this is a troll, he certainly is one of the most efficient in the monastery, even fooling experienced monks.

(@all please spare me with a psycho profile of his motives ... duck typing of his effects on the well being of the monastery is sufficient)

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery}

The "this" was the question — I have no doubts about bigup401 being an actual person because I have had the misfortune to work with outsource subcontractors who are like that guy. I once eventually gave up and rewrote an image-upload function that could not preserve aspect ratios for thumbnails. The rewrite collapsed half-a-dozen layers on the call stack to two, eliminating several wrapper functions that would accept thumbnail dimensions as arguments, ignore those arguments, and pass hard-coded values to the next function in the layer cake, which in turn ignores those values and passes different hard-coded values to the next function...

This questioner seems to chase fads, and I recently saw an article about item-scalping, so I suspect that he saw a similar article and decided to "get in the game" so to speak. It is one thing to be extremely thick, but bigup401 has combined being extremely thick with abusing the monastery as a free-as-in-beer code writing service and now seems to want code for less-than-honorable purposes. He is a blight upon our noble craft.

UPDATE: I had forgotten that each layer had different values, for that extra DailyWTF factor... — jcb

What you think?