If you want to use Perl for this task, why not using the DBI?

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use DBI;

my $db       = 'dbname';
my $user     = 'Caron';
my $password = 'secret!';
my $filename = shift 
    or die "filename required!\n";

my $dbh = DBI->connect(
        "dbi:mysql:$db",
        $user,
        $password,
        {RaiseError=>1, PrintError=>0})
    or die $DBI::errstr;

open FILE, "<$filename" or die;

{
    local $/ = ";\n";

    while (<FILE>) {
        eval {$dbh->do($_)};
        if ($@) {
            warn "Error at line $. ($DBI::errstr)\nstatement: $_\n";
            # eventually, issue a die call here
        }
    }

}

close FILE;
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This way, you can have better control of the errors.

HTH

You can ask for your new (open) process' STDERR to be redirected to the same place as its STDOUT by doing the following:

open(HAND,"mysql -u $user -p$pass $db < $file | 2>&1") 
      or return "failed: $!";
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When using open in the way you do above, you have to be very sure of the values in $user, $pass, $db and $file. If you read in these values from a user (whether on the commandline, through a GUI or through a webpage) you need to use taint checking and make sure that these values look right.

Consider the following example.

my $user = <STDIN>;
chomp $user;
open (HAND, "mysql -u $user") or die "error $!";
     # if $user = "fred; rm -rf *;" then your script will
     # try very very hard to remove everything in its    
     # working directory.
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#!/usr/bin/perl -wT 
# the -T flag turns on taint checking
use strict;
my $user = <STDIN>;
chomp $user;

     # make sure that $user only contains word characters
     # these are a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and _
     # if this is so, assign the value found to $user.
     # otherwise, die with an error
unless(($user) = ($user =~ /^(\w+/)$)) {
    die "Invalid username: $user\n";
}

open (HAND, "mysql -u $user") or die "error $!";
     # only good values of $user get to here
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If you're always hardcoding these values into a script then you should be fine. (Presumably anyone who has access to edit your script can already add lines in it to delete everything if they so desire...).

One final security warning is that doing what you're doing in your script won't hide your password from people looking at ps (the processes listing). When you open a process this way, you are creating another process and its commandline arguments are there for everyone (with access) to see. If hiding your password is essential you may need to do this another way.

The less simple answer depends on how much further this script is going to progress. If all you want is a simple wrapper around mysql so you don't have to type your username and password all the time then this is fine.

If you want to be able to do stuff with the mysql output etc, then you really ought to consider using DBI or one of the many other database modules.

I hope this helps.

jarich

Are you sure you want to use

return "fail";
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die "fail";
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open(CHK,"httpd -S 2>&1 |") || die "error vhosts $!\n";
while (my $li = <CHK>){
print "--$li\n";
}close CHK;
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