I:\svn\dbd-odbc\trunk>perl -le "use DBI; my $h = eval {DBI->connect('dbi:ODBC:in validsn', 'fred', 'fred', {RaiseError => 0, PrintError => 0})}; print 'error' . $@ if $@;print $h->ping;" Can't call method "ping" on an undefined value at -e line 1.