in reply to Script no longer exiting

even when I use die to try to kill it

Well, most likely your code never gets to the die function. Please state what exactly your code prints out, that may give us more clue as which statement caused the script to hang. I have made a guesses nevertheless: the while loop never exists and the execution never reaches the die function.

Another comment I want to make regarding your code is to use strict and use warnings. Have strict variable declarations to prevent Perl from automatically create variables for you. This will make your code easier to trace, and may save you a lot of debugging time in the future. One of the most comment dangers of not using strict pragma in the code is to misspell a variable name, and Perl creates a new variable with the misspelt name, leaving an inexperienced coder hours to figure out what is wrong with the code.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: Script no longer exiting
by SamCG (Hermit) on Oct 18, 2004 at 15:13 UTC
    Thanks for the advice, I certainly will do that (I hope to get to it later today). I'm not really sure how to run perl in the debugger. I apologize for not including the output or being more explicit in my original post.

    The output is: 
    c:\WINDOWS>snp500eps xxx xxx scg@mailhost.com
Getting SNP file from web. . .
Done getting file. . .
Opened Spread...
19.24   18.52   18.13   16.97   17.24   16.31
68.65
Different values!
DB:     68.07
silly program doesn't know it's over at C:\Perl\bin\snp500eps.pl line 
+63.
WEB:    68.65

    [download]

    where it just hangs with a blinking cursor at the end of "68.65_" (the underscore is the cursor). It does get the spreadsheet, the spreadsheet can be opened and the values get printed out appropriately, and the email is sent (so I know the variables' values are fine, and it certainly appear that it does actually get to the die function).

    Typically, I do use warnings, one reason I didn't here is because I notice a warning coming out of BasicRead related to a pack statement (this doesn't seem to interfere with actually reading the spreadsheet, however).
[reply]
[d/l]
      Looks suspicious, smells like some sort of text input problem. Can you try to append "\n" to the end of the $result, and see what happens?

[reply]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom