"grotesque"... nice Halloween word... ;-)

You make a good point--can we say *large* trigger point perhaps? I am working with Perl code that took over/"inherited" (not original developer), so I am trying to make it more manageable. What I inherited is, shall we say "grotesque", oh there is that word again... lol I am trying to bring some order and manageability to the chaos and madness that is currently in the code. All with being basically a Perl newbie.

I currently have a test log file and some simple testing routines that I created. The code I inherited had 5 different test log files for no good reason, and a myriad of junk testing code that was sometimes active, sometimes commented out--I stripped that out and implemented my stuff that I can control much more easily. Yeah, I know that there are modules... While some of them look good, frankly some of them look like the developer had too much time on their hands. :-D

Anyway, if there is an error log file somewhere on the server I am FTPing into, I have not yet found it. Also, the die's and miscellaneous error output's are not consistent in approach at all. I will probably have to create something around that, also. I also need to implement a consistent "fail strategy" (error exit) that will log error messages complete with date/time, context info (routine & caller), and will do a graceful shut down of MySQL (commit outstanding transactions) and do some sort of graceful exit with appropriate user message.