in reply to DBD::mysql trouble

This is off topic.. Your code looks really repetitive.
This is not a negative criticism- This is a suggestion- that there are ways of doing what you're doing in much more pleasant ways. It appears to me you code perl as you would code bash.. (?)..

For example in this chunk..

#Declaire all variables now! my $customer_firstname; #Store the customers first name my $customer_lastname; #Store the customers last name my $customer_phone; #Store the customers main phone number my $customer_email; #Store the customers email address my $customer_date; #date that the entry was made my $customer_AcceptTerm; #Accept Term of use? my $customer_compman; #Store the computer manufaturer my $customer_compmodel; #Store the computer model my $customer_compModelNum; #Store the computer model number my $customer_errormsg; #Store any and all error messages displaied my $customer_os; #Store what OS is being used my $customer_probdesc; #Store the problem description my $customer_loginpw; #Store the password for the admin/root user my $customer_service; #Store what services need to be done. my $customer_barcode; #Store the barcode for the computer. my $database = "Repairs"; #Specify the database to be used my $hostname = "192.168.1.111"; #Connect to the MySQL server my $port = '3306'; #MySQL port my $user = 'csccrepairs'; #MySQL username my $password = 'repairshop'; #MySQL password my $dsn; my $dbh;
You could do something like this maybe.. (untested)
my @customer_attributes = qw/firs_tname last_name phone email date Acc +ept_Term comp_man comp_model comp_Model_Num/; my %customer; @customer{@customer_attributes} =(); # Now you have %customer populated with the keys as undef... require String::Prettify; for my $att (@customer_attributes){ printf "%s: ", String::Prettify::prettify($att); my $input = <STDIN>; chomp($input); $customer{$att} = $input; }