Your Mother alerted me to a neat trick for keeping MySQL connection parameters in a safe place by using the mysql_read_default_file connection option.

A couple of points to note:

1. You can omit the name of the database from the data source name (dsn) but you need the trailing colon.
2. In the connect call the two undefs are needed (on the remote server at least, it worked ok locally without them).

See below for version info.

my $my_cnf = 'path_to_somewhere_safe/my_cnf.cnf';

my $dsn =
  "DBI:mysql:;" . 
  "mysql_read_default_file=$my_cnf";

my $dbh = DBI->connect(
    $dsn, 
    undef, 
    undef, 
    {RaiseError => 1}
) or  die "DBI::errstr: $DBI::errstr";
[download]

Note there is no connection info in the script at all. It's tucked away nicely in a cnf file. For example:

# my_cnf.cnf

[client]
host     = hostname
database = my_db
user     = my_usr
password = my_pwd
[download]

The DBD::mysql docs give an indication on how to use option files but more can be found on the MySQL site:

• Using Option Files

To see which options are available:

• mysql_options (half way down the page)

There is also an interesting article at:

• Hiding connection parameters with Perl/DBI

The last link points out that you need the two undef parameters in the connect statement.

Version info:

MySQL -> 4.0.17 (remote)
MySQL -> 4.1.15 (local)

DBI 1.32 (remote)
DBI 1.49 (local)

DBD::MySQL 2.0419 (remote)
DBD::MySQL 3.0002 (local)

Hope this is of some use and many thanks to Your Mother for the pointer.

John

update:

The 'interesting article' linked to above should be credited to gmax (see below).
++ to gmax

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