Ok, I'm a programmer that has been given the task to fix a bug with a Perl-generated web page. I have a background in mainframe programming, and I don't know a thing about Perl so please be gentle.

The page that I'm having trouble with is a query page that greps a particular log file for the a series of strings {tty2, tty3, tty4, ...., tty17} for a given date range.

The code is a loop from 2 - 17 that runs this grep: 

$start_ts = sprintf("\"%s %s:%s:00\"",$fromdate,$hr,$min);
$end_ts = sprintf("\"%s %s:%s:00\"",$todate,$tohour,$tomin);

for ($i = $TTYFIRST; $i <= $TTYLAST; $i++) {
  Tty_check($i,$start_ts,$end_ts,$selectedserver);
}


sub Tty_check {

   $tty_string = sprintf( "tty%d", $_[0] );
   $tty = qx{aml_read /l trace /h $_[3] /a commproc /s $_[1]  /b $_[2]
+ /d all | egrep -c -e $tty_string};
   printf("<TR ALIGN=LEFT VALIGN=TOP>\n");
   printf("<TD>%s</TD>\n",$tty_string);
   chomp($tty);
   printf("<TD>%d</TD>\n",$tty);
   printf("</TR>\n");

}

[download]

The query should return a number count for each string search. I've run the line from a UNIX prompt with hardcoded information in the variable names and received correct results. But through the Perl script the program falsely returns 0 as the count or ends abnormally before it can dynamically create the web page (I get a page not found error). Hardcoding the variable information in the Perl script and running it also works. The variables are also displayed and they appear to be correct.

I guess I have 2 questions:

1. Any suggestions on how to debug this?

2. I was hoping to display what that actual query looks like within the qx .... is there a way to write that out to a file or the html page?

Thank you for any help.

Bryan

In reply to a dumb question by Motley

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