Informix

Jacob:

I have not tried to do it this way, but have one "dumb thing" to get out of the way: 

Does the <SQL query> have the trailing semi-colon.

and one suggestion:

Try opening the pipe with:

"| dbaccess <database@server> - "  

Note the trailing dash which puts dbaccess into command line mode that might force it to process each command individually rather than waiting for EOF. You are currently running it in menu mode which can take a script as input so maybe it's just waiting for the end of the script to process?

Art

Hi Jacob,

I would recommend using DBD::Informix instead, more elegant of course.

Not sure why you need the pipe if you are producing an unload to a file. (if you need just the exit code, a system call would be sufficient from my perspective.)
Redirect output of the system call if you want to examine any error from the output.

Something like
system ("(echo \"unload to '/tmp/test.unl' delimiter ... select ....\" | dbaccess ${DB}) 2>&1 > /tmp/xxxx.out").

if ( $? -eq 0) {

    .... exit code was 0, do something with the unl

}

If I remember right, a trailing | will allow you to read the output in perl.

open (DB, "echo \"select ...\" | dbaccess ${DBNAME} |");

while <DB> ....

close (DB);

Best,

Marcus

1. Art, yes I do have the trailing dash.  I just forgot to put it in the sample code.  When You have to edit your post so s to keep database names confidential, it's easy to forget a detail like that.
2. Marcus,  If I had DBD::Informix installed, would I be going through these contortions?  We are working on it.  This machine didn't even have C language, let alone esql until late yesterday!

We should have these DBD and DBI modules installed by next week.  Thanks for the suggestions. I can see how Art would have seen the lack of the trailing dash as the cause of the trouble.

Andreas,

In the debugger, before I did the print (to send the SQL command to the file descriptor), I did $db_fd->autoflush(1). Ans, sure enough, it happened immediately!

I marked your reply as the best answer!

THANKS extremely!

-- Jacob S