Haven't you heard about Perl's %ENV hash?
This is where you would set the environment in a Perl program.
e.g.
BEGIN {
$ENV{ORACLE_HOME} = '/app/oracle/product/10.2.0';
$ENV{ORACLE_SID} = 'Something According to your tnsnames.ora';
}
Besides, running sqlplus in a system() call
isn't the best way to talk to your Oracle.
The common way in Perl was to "use DBI;".
This of course requires that you have DBD::Oracle installed in your Perl,
which under HP-UX can admittedly be a bit tricky (or ot at least used to be in the past).
Most of all it requires a perl built with following two leading libswanted:
$ perl -V:config_args
config_args='-Duselargefiles -Duse64bitall -A prepend:libswanted=cl pthread ';
But today this is all explained very detailed in the README.hpux that accompanies the DBD-Oracle*.tar.gz which you get from CPAN.
I suggest you check if your perl build meets this requirement using above perl -V invocation or this one
$ perl -V:libswanted
libswanted='cl pthread sfio socket bind inet nsl nm ndbm gdbm db malloc dl dld sun m crypt sec util c cposix posix ucb bsd';
Remember, that "cl pthread " must be leading the list of libs otherwise you will suffer.
Then open your CPAN shell as root,
install DBI and download DBD::Oracle
# perl -MCPAN -e shell
CPAN> install DBI
.
. # lots of output
.
CPAN> get DBD::Oracle
Now to install the DBD::Oracle module you should by all means first successfully run all tests of the module,
which requires careful preparation of your environment beforehand.
That's why I didn't suggest to simply issue
"install DBD::Oracle" above, as this usually fails.
So after the download of DBD::Oracle was successful you need to switch to the shell and prepare and run the test by manual invocation.
Do a
CPAN> look DBD::Oracle
This should have given you a shell and put you in the build directory of DBD::Oracle
Now please, *do* read the POD carefully before continuing because as said it is all outlined in it.
# perldoc README
and even more important
# perldoc README.hpux
or
# perldoc README.hpux.txt
if the README's name has changed to the latter.
If you fail to start perldoc for whatever reason you can also simply load the READMEs
into your favorite pager (like more).
Don't be put off by the strange POD markup then (viz. lines starting with an equals sign in the first column)
Then follow exactly the necessary steps mentioned in the POD.
After having installed DBD::Oracle successfully go on to read the PODs of
DBD::Oracle (mainly the section on how to connect) and DBI (for all the rest).
Madness, thy name is system administration
