You can't do a bunch of things and then check $! and have it be meaningful at all. Until you know exactly which statement caused $! to be set there is no point in looking at it at all. DBI, or any one of the modules you have in use may be setting $! inadverdantly and its value by the time you check it is actually meaningless. Put a or die "Error:$!"; everywhere it makes sense and see what happens, but drop the catchall test on $! at the end of your code, its worse than useless.