After working through a number of typos, I am getting closer. I agree, however, that the command works perfectly in MySQL. The issue is translating it to a DBI command. For my test, the MySQL command returns:

mysql> show columns in cmsParms;
+--------+-----------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| Field  | Type      | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
+--------+-----------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| pKey   | char(100) | NO   | PRI | NULL    |       |
| pValue | text      | NO   |     | NULL    |       |
+--------+-----------+------+-----+---------+-------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)
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From inside my code:

my $rval = 'rval (' . $table . ')';
my $sth2 = $dbh->prepare("SHOW COLUMNS IN $table where Field=?")
    or die 'prepare failed';
$sth2->execute( $field )
    or die 'execute failed';
if ( $sth2->err )
    { $rval .= 'error: [' . $sth2->errmsg . ']'; }
else
    {
    $rval .= '(' . $sth2->rows . ')';
    my ($arr, @arr, %arr, $field);
    while ( $arr = $sth2->fetchrow_hashref )
        {
        foreach $field ( keys %{ $arr } )
            {
            $rval .= "[".$field.":".$arr->{ $field }."]";
            }
        }
    }

return($rval);
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What now is returned ($rval) is:

[rval (cmsParms)(1)[Extra:][Type:char(100)][Field:pKey][Default:][Null
+:NO][Key:PRI]]
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This is exactly what I expected! Changes I made:

• I fixed a couple of (important) typos.
• I added "where Field=?" to the prepare, and $field in the execute, so it only returns the info for the one entry.

Thanks for your help!