Hello again and thank you for useful feedback. I am making very preliminary progress. I absolutely had to change some file paths up front for:

#set the log files

my $creationTime = strftime "%F-%R:%S", localtime;

$sqlLog = "C:/Users/thclotworthy/squirrel/logs/squirrel-sql-" . $creationTime . ".log";

$scriptLog = "C:/Users/thclotworthy/squirrel/logs/squirrel-" . $creationTime . ".log";

However, I am immediately getting error on the following line:

#Setup filehandlers for the mysql output log and the squirrel log

open($sqlFh, ">", $sqlLog) or exitOnError("Could not open $sqlLog for writing. Exiting......\n");

open($scriptFh, ">", $scriptLog) or exitOnError("Could not open $scriptLog for writing. Exiting......\n");

, where the exit on error is generated. Here is the exit on error subroutine:

sub exitOnError

{

    my $errorString = $_[0];

    print $sqlFh "$errorString\n";

    print $scriptFh "$errorString\n";

    print "$errorString\n";

    exit(9);

}

, and here is the actual failure message on the terminal:

print() on closed filehandle $sqlFh at squirrelBAK.pl line 855. Can't use an undefined value as a symbol reference at squirrelBAK.pl line 856.

, So I am guessing that sqlFh perhaps needs to be initialized and I am not doing that?. The only instance of it before the code above is at the beginning of the script with other parameters:

 my $dbHost;
my $dbPort;
my $serviceName;
my @connectionNames;
my %usernames;
my %passwords;
my $chosenRealm;
my $release;
my $releasePath;
my $sqlLog;
my $sqlFh;
my $scriptLog;
my $scriptFh;
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, So perhaps I supposed to be passing it as a command line argument or something? Grateful for any ideas. Thank you!

You might be interested in the original error string ($! and $^E) which might tell you more about the problem. Don't use the filehandle to report errors related to the filehandle itself.

open $sqlFh, '>', $sqlLog or die "Could not open $sqlLog for writing.\
+n$!\n$^E\nExiting...\n";
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BTW, do you know that double quotes interpolate variables?

$scriptLog = "C:/Users/thclotworthy/squirrel/logs/squirrel-$creationTi
+me.log";
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Also, declaring all the variables in one place usually makes their scope too wide. It's better to declare them only for the scope where they're really needed.

($q=q:Sq=~/;[c](.)(.)/;chr(-||-|5+lengthSq)`"S|oS2"`map{chr |+ord
}map{substrSq`S_+|`|}3E|-|`7**2-3:)=~y+S|`+$1,++print+eval$q,q,a,
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Check that folder C:/Users/thclotworthy/squirrel/logs exists and is writeable to.

poj

As debugging 101, I ran the first part of your code (below). Making a simple example for us is good, but in the future please make it a "runnable as is" example.

An obvious problem is that colon ":" is not valid in a Windows file name. Also regardless of that issue, the complete path does look a bit suspicious to me - that path does not exist on the Windows machine I'm writing this post upon using to write this post.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use POSIX qw(strftime);

my $creationTime = strftime "%F-%R:%S", localtime;

my $sqlLog = "C:/Users/thclotworthy/squirrel/logs/squirrel-sql-" . $cr
+eationTime . ".log";

my $scriptLog = "C:/Users/thclotworthy/squirrel/logs/squirrel-" . $cre
+ationTime . ".log";

print "$sqlLog\n$scriptLog\n";

__END__
prints:
C:/Users/thclotworthy/squirrel/logs/squirrel-sql--:23.log
C:/Users/thclotworthy/squirrel/logs/squirrel--:23.log
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As an extra updated note: I use Windows as my development platform and often move programs to a Unix environment. I try to only use file names that are compatible with both Windows and Unix. For example Windows allows a "space" in the name but Unix does not.(see post by choroba - my recollection of this is was evidently wrong). So I use underscore "_" instead of that (where possible). Of course there are situations on Windows where a space is need, e.g. "My Documents". Always use "/" instead of "\" for path names. That even works from the Windows command line (which BTW is NOT DOS). There are some weird situations where the backslash is needed, but I encounter this so rarely that I can't think of such an example right now. Perl is amazingly good at being multi-platform.

> For example Windows allows a "space" in the name but Unix does not

That's not precisely true.

perl -wle 'open my $fh, ">", "a b" or die $!; opendir my $dh, "." or d
+ie $!; print for grep / /, readdir $dh'
a b
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As you can see, the outer quotes are single, so I'm not on MSWin.

($q=q:Sq=~/;[c](.)(.)/;chr(-||-|5+lengthSq)`"S|oS2"`map{chr |+ord
}map{substrSq`S_+|`|}3E|-|`7**2-3:)=~y+S|`+$1,++print+eval$q,q,a,
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