Hi ikegami,

You are correct, am using Windows. I normally refer to CMD.EXE as DOS even though I mean it is the MSDOS Console

Not sure I understand your question on "How come you're not feeding the input to sqlplus plus as initially suggested?". Anyway, I think first is because I want the Perl script to run on both Windows and UNIX so I cannot use bash. I do not want to fork a separate shell as well so I took it off the bash. Because there will be two <<EOL/EOL combination, I found out the inner one need to be enclosed in DOUBLE QUOTE

On CMD.EXE, if I do:

open(OUTPUT, " > eol_dos.out") or die $!;
print OUTPUT <<EOL;
dir
EOL
[download]

eol_dos.out contains the literal dir instead of the output from the command dir. If I change <<EOL to <<`EOL` then I get the output from the dir command.

On *nix, I don't need to do <<`EOL`, i.e. <<EOL will do but am hoping that I do not need to have different versions for Windows and *nix so since <<`EOL` works for both *nix and Windows, I opted for that instead.

The sqlplus is working on *nix but not on Windows. Don't know what I need to do to get it to work on Windows.

Any suggestion on the sqlplus thing for Windows will be very much appreciated. I've run out of what else to try. BTW, reason why opting to do it this way is so I do not need to supply username and password to sqlplus as I cannot get SYSDBA connection to work on DBI:DBD. Already asked Pythian to confirm whether that option works on DBI:DBD but no response so far.

BTW, out of curiosity, do you type in your comments/reply typing <p> and </p> manually as well?

Thanks again for your response.

On *nix, I don't need to do <<`EOL`, i.e. <<EOL will do

That's not true. Taking the same code,

open(OUTPUT, " > eol_dos.out") or die $!;
print OUTPUT <<EOL;
dir
EOL
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>ver

Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]

>perl a.pl && type eol_dos.out
dir
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open(OUTPUT, " > eol_dos.out") or die $!;
print OUTPUT <<EOL;
ls -1
EOL
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$ uname
Linux

$ perl a.pl && cat eol_dos.out
ls -1
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The sqlplus is working on *nix but not on Windows

No. Like I said in my previous post, your sh shell command works in sh but not in cmd.

I do not want to fork a separate shell as well so I took it off the bash.

But that's you're doing. You're asking Perl to execute shell command

sqlplus -S "/as sysdba" <<"SQLEND"
set heading off
alter session set nls_date_format = 'DD-MON-YYYY HH24:MI:SS'
;

select 'Connected to the database on ' || sysdate
from dual
;
SQLEND
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so it launches a shell to execute it.

Any suggestion on the sqlplus thing for Windows will be very much appreciated.

Yes, stop invoking the shell. Create a pipe to sqlplus and pipe the data to it instead of asking the shell to do that.

Ideally, that would be

my @cmd = (
    sqlplus => (
        '-S',
        '/as' => 'sysdba',
    )
);

open(my $to_sqlplus, '|-', @cmd)
    or die("Can't launch sqlplus: $!\n");

print $to_sqlplus <<'__EOI__';
...
__EOI__

close($to_sqlplus);
[download]

But no-one has gotten around to implementing multi-arg open |-. So you can use

use IPC::Open2 qw( open2 );

my @cmd = (
    sqlplus => (
        '-S',
        '/as' => 'sysdba',
    )
);

local *TO_SQLPLUS;
my $pid = open2('>&STDOUT', *TO_SQLPLUS, @cmd)
    or die("Can't launch sqlplus: $!\n");

print TO_SQLPLUS <<'__EOI__';
...
foo
bar
...
__EOI__

close(TO_SQLPLUS);
waitpid($pid,0);
[download]

BTW, out of curiosity, do you type in your comments/reply typing <p> and </p> manually as well?

Yes. Well not </p>. It's optional in HTML.