Shell Programming and Scripting

To read/write to a DB from Java or Perl, you usually have to install/reference several drivers and write a whole bunch of boilerplate DB access code.

I'm curious if someone has written a command line utility for Unix/Linux for simple database access for the major providers, something like:

udbaccess -t [DB type] -c [connection string for db] -u [user id and password] -s [SQL script]

and it just executes the SQL script, and returns something. I would think that something like this would exist, but haven't found it.

If i undersatand your question correctly, you want to execute a sql script,sql query or a procedure in unix from command line. Right?

That is done easily.
Is there something more to your question?

As far as I know there's no such utility, mostly because whoever developed such a software would have to keep track of the development and protocols used by all major DBs to be independent of the specific drivers.

... and it has a command line util called dbish

DBI is a generic Database Access Layer written in Perl. I can't post URLs it seems, so you will have to look for DBI and dbish.