an executable that I can deliver to users who don't have perl installed on their machines. The exe has to connect to a database and must contain a password
That sounds dubious. Is the database on their network or yours ?

If it's on their network, put the user/pass in a plain textfile that gets read by the executable. You really shouldn't care if it readable by the customer.

If it's on your network, the executable should talk to the database via a carefully crafted set of RPC APIs (SOAP, XMLRPC, JSON, REST, whatever) that use password-auth/ACLs/IPs/certificates as appropriate to secure the service. Even then, you can feel free to store those credentials on the client's disk separately to the executable... just make sure users are aware of the security issues associated with losing/sharing their credentials (and you should have policies to deal with those aspects).

It's a really bad idea to expose an RDBMS over the internet.

-David

In reply to Re: PAR only filters one of two copies of the script to be placed in the executable by erroneousBollock
in thread PAR only filters one of two copies of the script to be placed in the executable by atopolc

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.