Re^3: designing a program - your wisdom needed

[SpaceCowboy]

To have some readability, as the queries are very long but you are right, it can be done with one program. Serial execution will remain a concern though - executing a program only after the previous step is completed successfully

[Marshall]

As I mentioned before, all programs provide the shell with an exit status. No errors is indicated by 0. The simple thing is to make a batch file and stop executing Perl programs when you get a non zero status code (no matter if negative or positive).

You don't mention your OS. For Windows command line:
test.bat


ECHO test.bat file starting....
perltest1.pl
IF %ERRORLEVEL% NEQ 0 EXIT /B %ERRORLEVEL%
perltest2.pl

perltest1.pl


use strict;
use warnings;

open my $fh, "<", "bogus file" or die "unable to open  file $!";

perltest2.pl


use strict;
use warnings;

print "this is test2";

running test.bat yields:


C:....PerlProjects>perltest1.pl
unable to open  file No such file or directory at C:......\PerlProject
+s\perltest1.pl line 4.

C:....PerlProjects>IF 2 NEQ 0 EXIT /B 2

So testperl1.pl returns code of 2. testperl2.pl never runs.

There are all sorts of fancy things that can be done with shell scripts. My advice is to keep things simple. Just automate the running of separate commands for each Perl program. Don't use Perl to run Perl programs. And avoid other tricky module oriented syntax. If you have a bash shell on Unix, then there is an equivalent set of statements which will do the same thing.

Update:
Now if you want to cause a non-zero exit, then "exit(2345);" in your Perl program will return code 2345.

Since you are using an Oracle DB, I would just use one of the many INI modules on CPAN to read an INI file with account and password. You will have a small amount of "boiler plate" code to add to each of your programs, but I don't see a problem with that.

And I guess you could pass the account and password to each of the programs from the command line. But overall, I think using an INI module is the least complicated way to do what you want.