Ok, I'll bite: how do I make it work?

• Prerequisites:
  • DBI
  • At least one DBD driver [technically not a requirement, but you won't get far with a database shell if you have no database to talk to...]
  • The client libraries for the db or db's you wish to talk to. Your vendor should supply these, although their docs can be spectacularly uncommunicative about how to set up a client only machine - it's almost as if they can't quite understand why you'd want to communicate with your db from a remote client.
  • GNU Readline
  • Term::ReadLine:: Gnu or Perl
  • Term::ReadKey
  • Perl 5.004 or later [also tested with 5.6.1 (no threads)]
• Installation:
  • tar -xzvf dbishell_<VERSION>.tar.gz
  • cd dbishell-<VERSION>/
  • make install
  • [ You will be asked some questions here: Where your perl binary lives is the only one that's really important ]
  • Assuming you answered /opt/foo to the second question:
  • Then: [Assuming it all seemed to work Ok] Something like one of these:
  • /opt/foo/bin/dbishell --driver Oracle --dsn 'host=foo.bar.org;sid=frogstar' --user=zaphod
  • /opt/foo/bin/dbishell --driver mysql --dsn 'hostname=foo.bar.org;database=frogstar' --user=zaphod
  • /opt/foo/bin/dbishell --driver Sybase --dsn 'interfaces=/home/adent/.sybase/sybase_interfaces_file;server=foo.bar.org' --user=zaphod
  • /opt/foo/bin/dbishell
  • You can type 'help' within dbishell for a quick and dirty run down of how it all works. I'm going to do a better help file. Honest. The README should contain the same info as the help message.
• NOTE: Debian users: there's a package in woody and sid, you can just 'apt-get install dbishell'.