Gramps! If you were in the U.S. right now, I'd wish you a happy Father's Day, since that is applicable at the moment here. (But I gather Australia's on the other side of the Date-line, and maybe doesn't even have this concept of one day for making fathers feel like they can get special attention.)

Anyway, I have run into the exact problem described in one of the posts above: macosx 10.6 (snow leopard, replacing a previous 10.5 on my macbook), Perl 5.10.0 (x86_64, as per the macosx distro), newly installed mysql 5.1.48 64-bit (replacing a 5.0.1 32-bit version that had been working fine with osx 10.5): DBI/DBD::mysql newly installed (the latter by hand, to get the tests to pass), and now a simple one-liner like this:

perl -MDBI -le '$d=DBI->connect("DBI:mysql:database=test;host=localhos
+t","test",""); print "ok"'
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Works fine when run as root, but fails (with the thread-topic error message) when run as me.

Your explanation sounded like something I might be able get my head around, but alas, I don't know what you're talking about. Where/how do I control or learn about this "word width" issue?

Actually, it turns out this anonymonk reply above had the right answer: a typical root shell in this sort of setup does not have "VERSIONER_PERL_PREFER_32_BIT=yes" when perl runs, whereas my own personal login account does. Of course, I don't have anything like this showing up in my normal shell environment -- it only shows up when I run perl, and if I change $ENV{VERSIONER_PERL_PREFER_32_BIT} to "no" inside a perl script, it's already too late to take effect (DBD::mysql still fails).

Luckily, if I this to my .bashrc file, perl pays attention, and DBD::mysql works (finally!!!)

export VERSIONER_PERL_PREFER_32_BIT=no
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So, to recap my voyage through this morass...

1. upgraded from macosx 10.5 to 10.6, causing upgrade from perl 5.8.8 
+to 5.10.0, and therefore...
2. had to "mysqldump --database each_db_needed | gzip > each_db_needed
+.dump.gz
(update) 2b. Shut down running mysqld
3. had to install mysql 5.1.48 64-bit (macosc binary distro)
4. change "/usr/local/mysql" symlink target from mysql-5.0.1 to mysql-
+5.1.48
(update) 4b. Start mysqld
5. gunzip < each_db_needed.dump.gz | mysql 
6. set up mysql accounts and passwords
7. install DBI (standard cpan style)
8. install DBD::mysql (by hand -- for some reason, 'testuser' needed t
+weaking)
9. add 'export VERSIONER_PERL_PREFER_32_BIT=no' to my .bashrc
10. hope that step 9 doesn't break lots of other stuff...
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This thread has proven to me once again how valuable perlmonks is. I'm moved to donate more money.

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