Yeah, that looks feasible in general, but as I mentioned in my OP, I don't want it to exit/die ever.
(Thx for looking that up for me anyway)
All the variations I've tried so far enable you to trap an error and do some(!) extra processing, then die/exit.
The prob I'm getting is that if you want to continue anyway, which I do, it's pretty consistent (see my results) that after approx 3 DB related errors, Perl dies regardless, even if you use a SIG{__DIE_} trap! :-(
If you know how to do what I want, I'll owe you big time...
Don't suppose you know how I could get someone like Merlyn or some other Perl internals guy to look at this? I feel it ought to be possible.
As background, the system is setup such that MySQL will (eventually) re-start, but I want my progs to survive till then, not die/restart as well.