NetWallah -
I can handle all kinds of criticism - I realize Perl isn't my strong suit. But when someone responds with 'Instant code smell at this point. I don't even want to look further.' that's just not even necessary. There's two options there:
(1) Ignore your gut reaction to respond that way and just don't say anything (our moms taught us that)
(2) Respond with a way to help me understand why I get the 'use of uninitialized value' errors, thus resulting in my 'initialization string' at the opening of my script
As for the database stuff, I can, and do use that often. I have written another PHP/Perl/MySQL interface that allows my company to process hundreds of lightweight access points to the customer's specifications, configure them, and provide a report. For my current application, it's just outputting a list of commands to be run on a switch that isn't local to me, and the output is going to be transient.