Mark-Jason Dominus sent your message to the beginners perl group, which
is probably the right place for this kind of question. You can
subscribe to the group through lear.perl.org.
As for your question, you should look into the Perl DBI set of packages
available from CPAN. You can get the documentation for them by going to
search.cpan.org and searching for Sybase and DBI. You will want to read
the DBD::Sybase docs and the DBI docs.
You can also download the packages from there but you might want to read
some of the general help files on CPAN first. There are a couple of
ways to install the packages which are described in the CPAN module
docs. One way is to download the tarball and do a make; make install
type of thing, another is to type 'perl -MCPAN -e shell'; You should
really read up on this a bit.
>From your mail though this might all be getting a little a head of
yourself. You were asking about file IO and error handling which are
covered in the Learning Perl book from Oreilly press. If you want to
try to stick with the online docs you should start with the www.cpan.org
and www.perldoc.org sites.
I hope this helps get you started, if you have any specific problems
post them to the beginners group. There are a lot of very friendly,
knowledgeable people here willing to help.
