First off, while you showed a lot of code, you may have left out some relevant things, like: "What does 'clean_sql()' do, exactly?" and "What is in @_ when this thing runs?"

I actually expect that this line is a mistake, or at least the assignment to @_ is unnecessary: 

my ($sql_bb_activity_code,...,$sql_bb_region_code)=@_;

[download]
Apart from that, some judicious use of arrays and hashes would make the code a lot shorter, more readable, and probably easier to maintain. Here's one way (which doesn't go as far as it could in terms of organizing things into data structures, but it goes a long way in the right direction), to set up the sql statement: 
use strict;   #  I assume your app already has this somewhere

#####################
# DECLARE VARIABLES #
#####################

my $count = 0;          # Count the number of rows
my @grab_results = ();  # Array containing results
my $statement;          # sql statement
my @error = ();         # Array to store any DB errors
my $connection_status;  # Tells us whether we connected to a DB or not

##################
# CGI PARAMETERS #
##################

my %bb;
my @fldnames = qw(emp_user_name bb_activity_code bb_model  bb_pin
                  bb_phone      bb_imei_esn_doc  bb_status bb_region_c
+ode);
my @fldops  =  qw(LIKE          LIKE             =         LIKE
                  LIKE          LIKE             =         =);

$bb{$_} = clean_sql(param($_)) for ( @fldnames );

##########################
# Generate SQL statement #
##########################

my $whereclause = '';
if ( $bb{emp_user_name} ne '*')
{
    my @conditions = ();
    for my $i ( 0 .. $#fldnames )
    {
        my $fname = $fldnames[$i];

        if ( $bb{$fname} ne '' )
        {
            push @conditions, "$fname $fldops[$i] " .
                (( $fldops[$i] eq '=' ) ?  $bb{$fname} : "\%$bb{$fname
+}\%" );
        }
    }
    exit if ( @conditions == 0 );

    $whereclause = 'WHERE ' . join( ' AND ', @conditions );
}

$statement = 'SELECT ' . join( ',', 'bb_id', @fldnames ) .
        " FROM blackberry $whereclause ORDER BY emp_user_name";


##################################################
# Connect to the database and send sql statement #
##################################################
# ...

[download]
That much, with your later stuff tacked on, passes "perl -cw", though it has not been tested in any way beyond that.

As for your later observations about how the script hangs with the sql statement that has no "WHERE" clause, you might need to make up an ad-hoc perl script that you can run from the command line to connect to the database and just run that one query and print output to the screen, to see what happens.

In reply to Re: Search breaks based on search string by graff
in thread Search breaks based on search string by Kiko

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