Shell Programming and Scripting

Problem: I have a shell script that will be called by a Perl module that will connect to a db and delete rows. The Perl module will be called by CRON. I am using a Perl module to call a shell script because I need to get the db connection from Perl.
Here is the Perl pseudocode:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl5.00506
use DBI;
##dblogin.pl provides a connection to the db. I retrieve the id, password, ##and host server variable from dblogin.pl
require "/cgi-bin/pswd/dblogin.pl";

$db_connection = $DB_id/$DB_pswd\@$DB_server;

#here is where I do not know what to do:
Call sh script RemoveRpts.sh and pass variable $db_connection

Maybe i didn't understand what you mean, but to me this looks simple: "$db_connection" is some sort of handle, id, ... - basically, it is something that fits into a variable.

Code:

RemoveRpts.sh $db_connection

will call a script RemoveRpts.sh and provide it with the content of this variable. Inside the script you can expand the first parameter by using "$1". Therefore the script could look like:

Code:

#!/bin/ksh

typeset db_connection=""

if [ -n "$1" ] ; then
     print - "Error: no database connection passed."
     exit 1
else
     db_connection="$1"
fi

# ... your code goes here

exit 0

Hope this helps.

bakunin

If $db_connection is just a string containing the DB name/hostname/username/password etc. then it is easy.

system("/path/to/RemoveRpts.sh '$db_connection'");

If it is a filehandle opened by DBI or so, then you can't pass it as a command-line argument. A filehandle is not a string, and can't be passed on the cmdline.

I am going to use system to call my shell script. Thank you for your help.

A filehandle is basically an integer and this can easily be passed to a script. If the script can make use of such an information is an entirely different matter of course - in fact it can't and I doubt that it is possible to write a program which can, because presumably the OS will not tolerate another process reusing filehandles created by another process. But then I'm out of software development for too long to be sure about that either.

bakunin