Specifying your own copy of Sybase interfaces file

This is something which we rarely face. And it is very annoying when it happens .. We need to access a Sybase ASE server from a script and it is not in the $SYBASE/interfaces file.

Now what do we do as all our Python scripts (using “Sybase” module) depend on it. I was tired searching a way out to specify the path of the interfaces file (my local copy) in the script.

It was good that I came out of the Pythinking and tried to see if Perl helps. And it gave me the answer .. just one line statement in your script. Below is the statement to specify the file in your Perl script (using Sybase::DBlib module).

dbsetifile($filename)

Job done !

By the way, you can specify your local copy of interface file for isql and defncopy by using the i option.

PS: This might be a simple trick for an old dog but this problem teased me for a while. And google search helped me only when I used Perl in the search keyword.

About the author

Vishnu Vardhan Chikoti is a co-author for the book "Hands-on Site Reliability Engineering". He is a technology leader with diverse experience in the areas of Application and Database design and development, Micro-services & Micro-frontends, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering and Machine Learning.